If You Will Consider The Incredible Number Of Little
Mouths, And The Busy Rate At Which They Ply Them Hour
By hour, you may
imagine what an immense number of grains of wheat must have escaped man's
hand, for you
Must remember that every time they peck they take a whole
grain. Down, too, come the grey-blue wood-pigeons and the wild
turtle-doves. The singing linnets come in parties, the happy
greenfinches, the streaked yellow-hammers, as if any one had delicately
painted them in separate streaks, and not with a wash of colour, the
brown buntings, chaffinches - out they come from the hazel copses, where
the nuts are dropping, and the hedge berries turning red, and every one
finds something to his liking. There are the seeds of the charlock and
the thistle, and a hundred other little seeds, insects, and minute
atom-like foods it needs a bird's eye to know. They are never still, they
sweep up into the hedges and line the boughs, calling and talking, and
away again to another rood of stubble without any order or plan of
search, just sowing themselves about like wind-blown seeds. Up and down
the day through with a zest never failing. It is beautiful to listen to
them and watch them, if any one will stay under an oak by the nut-tree
boughs, here the dragon-flies shoot to and fro in the shade as if the
direct rays of the sun would burn their delicate wings; they hunt chiefly
in the shade.
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