In August, When The Spring Begins To Infect Their Blood, They Repair
To The Trees At Intervals During The Day, Where They Sit Perched And
Motionless For An Hour Or Longer, All Singing Together.
This singing
time was when the peach trees were in blossom, and it was invariably
in the peach trees they settled and could be seen, the little yellow
birds in thousands amid the millions of pink blossoms, pouring out
their wonderful music.
One of the most delightful bird sounds or noises to be heard in
England is the concert-singing of a flock of several hundreds, and
sometimes of a thousand or more linnets in September and October, and
even later in the year, before these great congregations have been
broken up or have migrated. The effect produced by the small field
finch of the pampas was quite different. The linnet has a little
twittering song with breaks in it and small chirping sounds, and when
a great multitude of birds sing together the sound at a distance of
fifty or sixty yards is as of a high wind among the trees, but on a
nearer approach the mass of sound resolves itself into a tangle of
thousands of individual sounds, resembling that of a great concourse
of starlings at roosting time, but more musical in character. It is as
if hundreds of fairy minstrels were all playing on stringed and wind
instruments of various forms, every one intent on his own performance
without regard to the others.
The field finch does not twitter or chirp and has no break or sudden
change in his song, which is composed of a series of long-drawn notes,
the first somewhat throaty but growing clearer and brighter towards
the end, so that when thousands sing together it is as if they sang in
perfect unison, the effect on the hearing being like that on the sight
of flowing water or of rain when the multitudinous falling drops
appear as silvery-grey lines on the vision. It is an exceedingly
beautiful effect, and so far as I know unique among birds that have
the habit of singing in large companies.
I remember that we had a carpenter in those days, an Englishman named
John, a native of Cumberland, who used to make us laugh at his slow
heavy way when, after asking him some simple question, we had to wait
until he put down his tools and stared at us for about twenty seconds
before replying. One of my elder brothers had dubbed him the
"Cumberland boor." I remember one day on going to listen to the choir
of finches in the blossoming orchard, I was surprised to see John
standing near the trees doing nothing, and as I came up to him he
turned towards me with a look which astonished me on his dull old
face - that look which perhaps one of my readers has by chance seen on
the face of a religious mystic in a moment of exaltation. "Those
little birds! I never heard anything like it!" he exclaimed, then
trudged off to his work. Like most Englishmen, he had, no doubt, a
vein of poetic feeling hidden away somewhere in his soul.
We also had the other kind of concert-singing by another species in
the plantation. This was the common purple cow-bird, one of the
Troupial family, exclusively American, but supposed to have affinities
with the starlings of the Old World. This cow-bird is parasitical
(like the European cuckoo) in its breeding habits, and having no
domestic affairs of its own to attend to it lives in flocks all the
year round, leading an idle vagabond life. The male is of a uniform
deep purple-black, the female a drab or mouse-colour. The cow-birds
were excessively numerous among the trees in summer, perpetually
hunting for nests in which to deposit their eggs: they fed on the
ground out on the plain and were often in such big flocks as to look
like a huge black carpet spread out on the green sward. On a rainy day
they did not feed: they congregated on the trees in thousands and sang
by the hour. Their favourite gathering-place at such times was behind
the house, where the trees grew pretty thick and were sheltered on two
sides by the black acacias and double rows of Lombardy poplars,
succeeded by double rows of large mulberry trees, forming walks, and
these by pear, apple and cherry trees. From whichever side the wind
blew it was calm here, and during the heaviest rain the birds would
sit here in their thousands, pouring out a continuous torrent of song,
which resembled the noise produced by thousands of starlings at
roosting-time, but was louder and differed somewhat in character owing
to the peculiar song of the cow-bird, which begins with hollow
guttural sounds, followed by a burst of loud clear ringing notes.
These concert-singers, the little green and yellow field finch and the
purple cow-bird, were with us all the year round, with many others
which it would take a whole chapter to tell of. When, in July and
August, I watched for the coming spring, it was the migrants, the
birds that came annually to us from the far north, that chiefly
attracted me. Before their arrival the bloom was gone from the peach
trees, and the choir of countless little finches broken up and
scattered all over the plain. Then the opening leaves were watched,
and after the willows the first and best-loved were the poplars.
During all the time they were opening, when they were still a
yellowish-green in colour, the air was full of the fragrance, but not
satisfied with that I would crush and rub the new small leaves in my
hands and on my face to get the delicious balsamic smell in fuller
measure. And of all the trees, after the peach, the poplars appeared
to feel the new season with the greatest intensity, for it seemed to
me that they felt the sunshine even as I did, and they expressed it in
their fragrance just as the peach and other trees did in their
flowers.
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