The chaffinch is not an interesting person, and he is so numerous that one soon becomes weary of him and his song. Let us hope that he expresses his real nature in the building of his pretty nest rather than in song. This must, I think, often happen, and to take an example from human builders, it is not inconceivable that the architect of St. John’s College Chapel, Cambridge, may have sung delightfully. But there are limits to one’s faith, and personally I cannot imagine the desecrator of Pembroke College in the same injured town of Cambridge practising any art in a way that would please me.
To return to birds—the greenfinch is a pleasant singer, or perhaps a conversationalist. I am never tired of hearing him repeat the word “Squeese” as
he sits hidden in the heavy shade of the summer elms. His twinkling bell-note with its contented simplicity is also attractive. His cousin, the bunting, makes remarks not unlike those of the greenfinch; and he appears to address them by preference to the travellers on dusty high roads, where he passes much of his time sitting on telegraph wires. The anchorite yellow-hammer persistently declining cheese with his bread is always pleasant. Professor Newton used to say that the spring begins with the yellow-hammer’s song. According to Blomefield’s Calendar [8] the average date in Cambridgeshire is February 16, but he has been known to sing on January 30—rather a wintry beginning for spring. I have never made up my mind as to what the kitty-wren says or sings. He is always in a desperate hurry to get through his piece, as if he were afraid of lagging behind the beat of some invisible conductor. In consequence of this there is a want of restraint, and a style that suggests a shy child gabbling a show bit of poetry. But I repent these words for I love the kitty-wren.
There are a multitude of other bird-sounds which are pleasant to hear as their turn comes round, for instance, the complaint of the wryneck, the “cuckoo’s mate,” who seems to me to be querulously expressing his dislike to my garden, which he tries year after year and deserts after a day or two.
I have never heard that contented bird the
quail, who should be a wholesome lesson to all wrynecks. I should like to hear him as Schubert has him:
“Sitzend im Grünen
Mit Halmen umhüllt,”
and singing “Lobe Gott” all day in the rhythm with which the oboe praises God in the Pastoral Symphony.
Another bird, whom I take for a contented fellow, is the green woodpecker, for he goes through life laughing, but I am not quite sure that I should like his taste in jokes. He is always associated in my mind with a passage in a letter of my father’s: “At last I fell fast asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me; and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.” [9]
There are many noises rather than notes which are most pleasant to hear. The invisible industrious corncrake, whose persistent cry comes from nowhere and everywhere at once. The harsh warning of the jay who seems to say “Man! man!” as he skulks off when his wood is invaded. The rough noise of the ox-eye sharpening his little saw, and many others.