FullReads

The Butcher’s Boy of the Woods
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The concert continues, and waxes more and more frenzied. Sudden as a bolt from heaven a wild duck and his mate crash past through the leaves, like quick rifle shots cutting through brushwood. They end their sharp, breathless rush in the water of the river pool with a loud “Splash! splash!” Before the songsters have time to resume their interrupted rivalry a missel thrush, the strident whistling butcher’s boy of the wood, appears round the corner, and, just like that blue-aproned youth, he proceeds to cuff and abuse all the smaller fry, saying, “Yah! get along! Who’s your hatter? Does your mother know you’re out?” and other expressions of the rude, bullying youth of the streets. The missel thrush is a born bully. It is not for nothing that he is called the Storm Cock. It is more than suspected that he sucks eggs, and even murder in the first degree–ornithologic infanticide–has been laid to his charge. The smaller birds, at least, do not think him clear of this latter count, for he has not appeared many minutes before he is beset by a clamorous train of irate blue-tits, who go into an azure fume of minute rage; sparrows also chase him, as vulgarly insolent as himself, and robin redbreasts, persistent and perkily pertinacious, like spoiled children allowed to wear their Sunday clothes on week-days.

The Dust of Battle
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So great is the dust of battle that it attracts a pair of hen harriers, the pride of the instructed laird, and the special hatred of his head keeper. Saunders Tod would shoot them if he thought that the laird would not find out, and come down on him for doing it. He hates the “Blue Gled” with a deep and enduring hatred, and also the brown female, which he calls the “Ringtail.” The Blue and the Brown, so unlike each other that no ordinary person would take them for relatives, come sailing swiftly with barely an undulation among the musical congregation. The blackbird, wariest of birds–he on the top of the larch–has hardly time to dart into the dark coverts of the underbrush, and the remainder of the crew to disperse, before the Blue and the Brown sail among them like Moorish pirates out from Salee. A sparrow is caught, but in Galloway, at least, ’tis apparently little matter though a sparrow fall. The harriers would have more victims but for the quick, warning cry of the male bird, who catches sight of us standing behind the shining grey trunk of the beech. The rovers instantly vanish, apparently gliding down a sunbeam into the rising morning mist which begins to fill the valley.

Comes the Day
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Now we may turn our way homeward, for we shall see nothing further worth our waiting for this morning. Every bird is now on the alert. It is a remarkable fact that though the pleasure-cries of birds, their sweethearting and mating calls, seem only to be intelligible to birds of the same race, yet each bird takes warning with equal quickness from the danger-cry of every other. Here is, at least, an avian “Volapuk,” a universal language understanded by the freemasonry of mutual self-preservation.

While we stood quiet behind the beech, or beneath the elder, nature spoke with a thousand voices. But now when we tramp homewards with policeman resonance there is hardly a bird except the street-boy sparrow to be seen. The blackbird has gone on ahead and made it his business, with sharp “Keck! keck!” to alarm every bird in the woods. We shall see no more this morning.

Listen, though, before we go. Between six and seven in the morning the corn-crake actually interrupts the ceaseless iteration of his “Crake! crake!” to partake of a little light refreshment. He does not now say “Crake! crake!” as he has been doing all the night–indeed, for the last three months–but instead he says for about half an hour “Crake!” then pauses while you might count a score, and again remarks “Crake!” In the interval between the first “Crake!” and the second a snail has left this cold earth for another and a warmer place.

Now at last there is a silence after the morning burst of melody. The blackcap has fallen silent among the reeds. The dew is rising from the grass in a general dispersed gossamer haze of mist. It is no longer morning; it is day.