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The long-tailed swallows and the white-throated martins were with us for six months, but about the middle of October they were no more seen. All have gone southwards towards the Afric shore, seeking warmth and days of endless sunshine. Gone, too, the blackcap, the redstart, and the little fly-catcher; vanishing in the dark night, they gathered in legions and sped across the seas.
But this does not mean that the Chiffchaff suffers persecution; it is itself most aggressive, as is shown by the fact that it will join in the Blackcap quarrels and attack the combatants indiscriminately.
Although in the lark's song there are occasional musical notes, the song as a whole is not very musical; but it is so joyous, buoyant and unbroken, and uttered under such conditions as fully to entitle the bird to the place he occupies with both poet and prose writer. The most musical singer we heard was the blackcap warbler. To my ear its song seemed more musical than that of the nightingale.
It is not yet noon, these songs have been ceaseless since dawn; this evening, after the yellowhammer has sung the sun down, when the moon rises and the faint stars appear, still the cuckoo will call, and the grasshopper lark, the landrail's "crake, crake" will echo from the mound, a warbler or a blackcap will utter his notes, and even at the darkest of the summer night the swallows will hardly sleep in their nests.
Having reached the patch, we found almost as bad a tangle as in the blackcap patch, except that the canes were more upright in their growth and less full of spines or briers. "It's plain enough," continued Mr. Jones, "that old man Jamison was too poorly to take much care of things last year. You see, these red raspberries grow different from those black ones yonder.
The chances his sister Mary had missed rose up in his mind why, he did not know; and a little bored by these memories, he suddenly became absorbed in the little bleat of a blackcap perched on a bush, the only one amid a bed of flags and rushes; 'an alder-bush, he said.
But we will call it a blackcap: blackcap has a sweet, saucy sound like its own note, and is the pretty translation of caponero, a name which the bird might gladly know itself by. Villa Papa Giulio is but a little place compared with something on the scale of the Villa Pamfili Doria though from its casino it has a charm far beyond that.
Loud and close at hand were heard the lusty notes of thrush and blackbird, chaffinch and blackcap; and from these there was a gradation of sounds, down to the faint lispings of the more tender melodists singing at a distance, reaching the sense like voices mysterious and spiritualised from some far unseen world.
I had already heard nightingales in abundance near Lake Como, and had also listened to larks, but I had never heard either the blackbird, the song thrush, or the blackcap warbler; and while I knew that all three were good singers, I did not know what really beautiful singers they were.
Weir, J. Jenner, on the nightingale and blackcap; on the relative sexual maturity of male birds; on female pigeons deserting a feeble mate; on three starlings frequenting the same nest; on the proportion of the sexes in Machetes pugnax and other birds; on the coloration of the Triphaenae; on the rejection of certain caterpillars by birds; on sexual differences of the beak in the goldfinch; on a piping bullfinch; on the object of the nightingale's song; on song-birds; on the pugnacity of male fine-plumaged birds; on the courtship of birds; on the finding of new mates by Peregrine falcons and Kestrels; on the bullfinch and starling; on the cause of birds remaining unpaired; on starlings and parrots living in triplets; on recognition of colour by birds; on hybrid birds; on the selection of a greenfinch by a female canary; on a case of rivalry of female bullfinches; on the maturity of the golden pheasant.
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