Far and wide the birds answered the call of the sun. Big pinions flew across the sky, casting shadows on the snow-scape as they passed; small birds darted in and out of holes in tree trunks, or crannies under the eaves; there was a cheeping and a chattering all over the garden and the orchard; while up and down the larches flitted the tits—the blue-tits swinging upside down, almost turning somersaults, as the notion chanced to take them; the coal-tits, any number of them, skipping about from branch to branch, never still a moment, always talking in their brisk little twitter; while over all there rang incessantly the “Pinker, pinker, peter, peter,” of the great-tit.
Near at hand, robin, my little garden companion, was having a good deal to say. At first I think he was reiterating what he had often said before: that he considered the dog a nuisance that ought to be banished from any properly conducted garden, since his habit of chasing every moving object within sight was disturbing, to say the least of it, to a conscientious worm-hunter.
Having finished on this subject, he began to talk about other things; but try as I would, I could not understand what he said; yet I knew he was trying to tell me something. He kept taking short flights over to the wall, and then back to some branch near at hand. “Twitter, twitter,” he kept on saying; yet he never even noticed the path I was clearing, back he would fly to the wall.
At last, as he impatiently fluffed out his feathers, perched on a white currant bush, till he looked like a ball, saying a lot more the while, I made my way through the snow to the wall. He darted after me, and stood on top of a mound of leaves that had been swept together last autumn, and left to stand till the spring digging should start. Being on the south side of the wall, and sheltered a little by the wide-spreading branches of a big Spanish chestnut, it had escaped a good deal of the snow, though it was frozen hard on the surface.
Here robin stood, and when he saw I was looking at him, he pecked several times with his beak at the solid mass. Then he flicked his tail and gazed at me. “Surely you understand what I want?” he said with his beady eyes. “No? Oh! how stupid human beings are! Well, watch me again!” Dab, dab, dab, went the small beak once more, without making the slightest impression on the ice-bound lumps.
Then I grew intelligent.
“Out of the way,” I said to him, and he flew to a low branch of the tree and watched me critically, while I drove the spade well into the mass.
“That’s right,” he chirped out excitedly, as I turned it over and got down to the softer portion, spreading the leaves about. “Why on earth couldn’t you have done that sooner!” as he swooped down to my very feet and seized something wriggly—gulp! I looked away.
What ninety-ninth sense is it, I wonder, that tells birds when food is about? One moment robin and I had the chestnut tree and its environment to ourselves. Next moment, directly I turned away, down came thrushes, and blackbirds, and starlings; and though robin put his foot down firmly, said it was all his, every worm of it, and dared anyone else to touch so much as a caterpillar-egg, or he’d know the reason why, he was outdone by numbers, and finally lost what he might have had because he considered it his duty to chastise Mr. Over-the-wall-robin, who had presumed to say that the leaf-heap belonged to him!