A Year with the Birds / Third Edition, Enlarged

by W. Warde Fowler

A little further down the line is another bridge, in which a Blue-tit found a hole for its nest last year; this also was in the inside of the bridge, and close to the up-line. This bridge is a good place from which to watch the Tree-pipit, and listen to its charming song. All down the line, wherever it passes a wood or a succession of tall elms and ashes, these little grayish-brown birds build their nest on or close to the grassy banks, and take their station on the trees or the telegraph-wires to watch, to sing, and to enjoy themselves. A favourite plan of theirs is to utter their bright canary-like song from the very top twig of an elm, then to rise in the air, higher and higher, keeping up their energies by a quick succession of sweet shrill notes, till they begin to descend in a beautiful curve, the legs hanging down, the tail expanded and inclined upwards, and the notes getting quicker and quicker as they near the telegraph-wires or the next tree-top. When they reach the perching-place, it ceases altogether. So far as I have noticed, the one part of the song is given when the bird is on the tree, the other when it is on the wing. The perching-song, if I may call it so, is possessed by no other kind of Pipit; but the notes uttered on the wing are much the same with all the species.

The young student of birds may do well to concentrate his attention for awhile on the Pipits, and on their near relations, the Larks and the Wagtails. These three seemed to form a clearly-defined group; and though in the latest scientific classification the Larks have been removed to some distance from the other two (which form a single family of Motacillidae), it must be borne in mind that this is in consequence only of a single though remarkable point of difference. Apart from definite structural characters, a very little observation will show that their habits are in most respects alike. They all place their nests on the ground; and they all walk, instead of hopping; the Larks and the Pipits sing in the air, while the Pipits and the Wagtails move their tails up and down in a peculiar manner. All are earth-loving birds, except the Tree-pipit and the Wood lark.

We may now leave the railway, and enter the woodland. Most of the birds that dwell here have been already mentioned; and I shall only mention in passing the Jays, the Magpies, and the Crows, those mischievous and predatory birds, which probably do more harm to the game in a single week of April or May, than the beautiful mice-eating Kestrel does during the whole year. They all rob the nests of the pheasants and partridges, both of eggs and young; and when I saw one day in the wood the bodies of some twenty robbers hung up on a branch, all belonging to these three species, I could not but feel that justice had been done, for it is not only game birds who are their victims. A large increase of these three species would probably have a serious result on the smaller winged population of a wood.

Grasshopper Warbler.

Among the more interesting inhabitants of the wood, there are two species which have not as yet been spoken of in these chapters—the Grasshopper Warbler and the Nightingale. The former has no right to be called a warbler, except in so far as it belongs to one of those three families mentioned in a former chapter, in which all our British ‘warblers’ are now included. It has no song, properly so called; but no one who has the luck to watch it alive, even without a detailed examination of its structure, will doubt its true relationship to the Sedge-warbler and the Reed-warbler. It is not a water-haunting bird, but still rather recalls the ways of its relations, by choosing deep ditches thickly grown with grass and reeds, and sheltered by bramble-bushes; it seems to need something to climb up and down, and to creep about in; like the sedge-birds, it seldom flies any distance, and one is tempted to fancy that all these species would gradually lose the use of their wings as genuine organs of flight, if it were not for the yearly necessities of migration.

I once had a remarkable opportunity of watching this very curious bird. It was about the beginning of May, before the leaves had fully come out; a time which is very far the best in the year for observing the smaller and shyer birds. Intent on pairing or nest-building, they have little fear, if you keep quite quiet, and you can follow their movements with a glass without danger of losing sight of them in the foliage. I was returning from a delicious morning ramble through Bruerne wood, and was just rounding the last corner of it, where a small plantation of baby saplings was just beginning to put on leaf, when my ear caught the unmistakable ‘reel’ of this bird. Some other birds of the warbler kind, Wren, Robin, Sedge-bird, can produce a noise like the winding-up of a watch, but none of these winds it up with such rapidity, or keeps it going so long as the Grasshopper Warbler, nor does any cricket or grasshopper perform the feat in exactly the same way. Our bird’s noise—we cannot call it a voice—is like that of a very well-oiled fisherman’s reel,[40] made to run at a very rapid rate, and its local name of the ‘reel-bird’ is a perfectly just and good one.

I was on the outside of a little hedge, and the noise proceeded from the saplings on its further side. In order to see the bird I must get over the hedge, which could not be done without a scrunching and crackling of branches sufficient to frighten away a much less wary bird than this. There seemed, however, to be no other chance of getting a sight of the bird, so through the hedge I went; and tumbled down on the other side with such a disturbance of the branches that I gave up all hope of attaining my object.

Great was my astonishment when I saw only a few yards from me a little olive-brown bird creeping through the saplings, which I knew at once to be the Grasshopper Warbler. I then took up a fixed position, the little bird after a minute or two proceeded to do the same, and for some time I watched it with my glass, as it sat on a twig and continued to utter its reel. It was only about ten paces from me, and the field-glass which I carried placed it before me as completely as if it had been in my hands. What struck me most about it was its long supple olive-green neck, which was thrust out and again contracted as the reel was being produced; this being possibly, as I fancy, the cause of the strange ventriloquistic power which the bird seems to possess; for even while I watched it, as the neck was turned from side to side, the noise seemed to be projected first in one direction and then in another.[41] The reel was uttered at intervals, and as a general rule did not continue for more than a quarter of a minute, but one spell of it lasted for forty seconds by my watch. It is said to continue sometimes for as much as twenty minutes, but I have never been fortunate enough to hear it for anything approaching to that length of time.

Our interview was not to last very long. It unluckily happened that my little terrier, who accompanies me in all my walks, and is trained to come to heel when anything special is to be observed, had been out of sight when I broke the hedge; and now he must needs come poking and snuffing through the saplings just as if a Grasshopper Warbler were as fair game as a mole or a water rat. Nevertheless, so astonishing was the boldness of this bird that he allowed the dog to hunt about for some time around him without being in the least disconcerted.[42] When at last he made off he retreated in excellent order, merely half flying, half creeping with his fan-like tail distended, until he disappeared in the thick underwood. I would have taken the dog under my arm and tried for another interview, which no doubt he would have given me, if I had not been obliged to depart in order to catch a train to Oxford. This bird was undoubtedly a male who was awaiting the arrival of the females: just at this time they not only betray themselves more easily by the loudness of their reel, but also are well known to be less shy of showing themselves than at any other period of their stay with us. This is the case with most of our summer migrants. Only a few minutes before I found this bird, I had been watching a newly-arrived cock Nightingale, who had not yet found his mate, and was content to sing to me from the still leafless bough of an oak-tree, without any of the shyness he would have shown two or three weeks later.