The Blackbirds Are The Thrushes' Masters, And Drive Them
From Any Morsel They Fancy.
There is very little humanity among them:
One
poor thrush had lost the joint of its leg, and in order to pick up
anything had to support itself with one wing like a crutch. This bird was
hunted from every spot he chose to alight on; no sooner did he enter the
garden than one of the stronger birds flew at him - 'so misery is trodden
on by many.' There was a drone-fly on a sunny wall on January 20, the
commonest of flies in summer, quite a wonder then; the same day a
house-sparrow was trying to sing, for they have a song as well as a
chirp; on January 22 a tit was sharpening his saw and the gnats were
jumping up and down in crowds - this up-and-down motion seems peculiar to
them and may-flies. Then the snowdrops flowered and a hive-bee came to
them; next the yellow crocus; bees came to these, too, and so eager were
they that one bee would visit the same flower five or six times before
finally going away. Bees are very eager for water in the early year; you
may see them in crowds on the wet mud in ditches; there was a wild bee
drowning in a basin of water the other day till I took him out.
Before the end of January the woodbine leaf was out, always the first to
come, and never learning that it is too soon; whether the woodbine came
over with 'Richard Conqueror' or the Romans, it still imagines itself ten
degrees further south, so that some time seems necessary to teach a plant
the alphabet.
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