United States or Serbia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Either camp out or settle down for a month or two in a hut, with one of the country people to cook. There must be sport, or agriculture, or village characters, or architecture, or botany, or geology to study: bird-life and bird-watching are never-ending interests; the fields are never empty.
Everything has to be subordinated to the hope of catching sight of a hypothetical bird which you have probably seen dozens of times already. Truly, there is no accounting for human vices. There is, however, at least this to be said in favour of bird-watching, that it is the pleasantest of the vices, that it is cheaper than golf, and does not harden the arteries like tea-drinking.
He and the elder brother had agreed to play a practical joke on me, and had snared a common cowbird and dyed or painted its tail a brilliant scarlet, then liberated it, expecting that I should meet with it in my day's rambles and bird-watching in the plantation and would be greatly excited at the discovery of yet a third purple cowbird, with a scarlet tail, but otherwise not distinguishable from the common one.
Nevertheless, these games horse-racing, sham fights, and ostrich- hunting, and the like gave me no abiding satisfaction; they were no sooner over than I would go back, almost with a sense of relief, to my solitary rambles and bird-watching, and to wishing that the day would come when my masterful brother would allow me to use a gun and practise the one sport of wild-duck shooting I desired.
Firstly, it is only the favoured few to whom it is given to spend more than ten days at a time in the cool heights; most of us have to toil in the hot plains. Secondly, the thick foliage of the mountain-side makes bird-watching a somewhat difficult operation.
Word Of The Day