“Oh! did you hear a voice of death?
And did you not mark a paly form,
Which rode on the silver mist of the heath,
And sang a ghostly dirge in the storm?”
All this, and ever so much more of quaint and interesting tradition, has its source in the impressive uncanny cries with which the curlews, flying by night, keep their company all safely together. The woodpecker again, Tennyson’s “garnet-headed yaffingale,” the bird of Picus the augur, which breaks with his crazy ringing laugh so suddenly upon the solitude, is familiar only to those who live near woods. Marvel has some excellent but little-known lines on the “hewel,” as he calls this bird of many aliases:
“He walks still upright from the root,
Measuring the timber with his foot,
And all the way to keep it clean
Doth from the bark the wood-moths glean.
He with his beak examines well
Which fit to stand and which to fell.
The good he numbers up and tracks,
As if he marked them with an axe;
And when he, tinkling with his beak,
Doth find the hollow out to speak,
That for his building he designs,
And through the tainted hide he mines.”
The coot, too, is a bird only familiar to such as dwell near quiet waters—a whimsical and odd-mannered amphibian, that gives a very pleasing animation to the sequestered places it frequents, for whether diving and ducking in the water, or moving with flicking tail about the banks, in that “jerky, high-stepping manner” which Dudley Warner disliked so delightfully in his neighbours’ hens, it is a fowl of pantomimic behaviour that is very diverting to watch.
Other birds, again, are too common to be significant of time or of season, though, among them are many of the most popular of our feathered folk—the beautiful and merry chaffinch, the roadside yellowhammer, the linnets that are everywhere, the delightful goldfinch and bullfinch, the sweet-song hedge-sparrow, the handsome monotonous greenfinch, the ubiquitous sparrow—“meanest of the feathered race,” as Cowper unkindly calls it—and the dainty water-wagtails that
