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The battle lasted for fifteen minutes or more, and the four birds, collecting together, pursued and attacked one another at one moment in the air, at another upon the roof of a house where they would alight and flutter about on the slates, uttering their call-note without ceasing until finally they disappeared from view, still, however, continuing the struggle.
Few persons seem aware that the goldfinch is also a winter bird, it is so brilliant and familiar in summer and so neutral and withdrawn in winter. The call-note and manner of flight do not change, but the color of the males and their habits are very different from their color and habits in summer.
The rabbits extended their galleries and dug new "breeding earths" in their warren by the wood; and often, in the deep stillness of the night, the call-note of an awakened bird echoed, murmuring, among the rocks opposite the pines far down the slope. During the past few weeks great events had happened in the new-made chamber of the field-voles' burrow.
Jenner Weir has mentioned to me a nearly similar case; at Blackheath he never sees or hears the note of the wild bullfinch, yet when one of his caged males has died, a wild one in the course of a few days has generally come and perched near the widowed female, whose call-note is not loud. Mr.
Nor is their wonder diminished by what they see and hear close at hand. It is the call-note of the black woodpecker. And, as if in response to it, a kingfisher, perched on the limb of a dead tree by the beach, now and then utters its shrill, ear-piercing scream. Other fishing-birds of different species fly hither and thither over the water, now quite tranquil, the wind having died away.
"Here we have a northern winter bird or, at least, one that we associate with winter and call the Snowbird; for everybody sees him on his autumn and winter travels, and knows his Sparrow-like call-note, while his summer home is so far north or so high on mountains that few visit him in the tangled woodlands where he sings a pretty trilling song to his mate.
Distant crashes, single and impressive; stealthy footsteps near at hand; the subdued scratching of claws; a faint sniff! sniff! sniff! of inquiry; the sudden clear tin-horn ko-ko-ko-oh of the little owl; the mournful, long-drawn-out cry of the loon, instinct with the spirit of loneliness; the ethereal call-note of the birds of passage high in the air; a patter, patter, patter among the dead leaves, immediately stilled; and then at the last, from the thicket close at hand, the beautiful silver purity of the white-throated sparrow the nightingale of the North trembling with the ecstasy of beauty, as though a shimmering moonbeam had turned to sound; and all the while the blurred figure of the moon mounting to the ridge-line of your tent these things combine subtly, until at last the great Silence of which they are a part overarches the night and draws you forth to contemplation.
Do you hear? Bluebirds have a call-note and a sweet warbling song. As I have told you before, all birds have some note or sound that they use to attract attention or call their mates; but it is only those whose voices are so highly developed that they can make really continuous musical sounds, that are called song birds. "The male is the only real singer in Birdland.
The true song, however, of most birds and various strange cries are chiefly uttered during the breeding- season, and serve as a charm, or merely as a call-note, to the other sex. Naturalists are much divided with respect to the object of the singing of birds.
It has flown a little further off and is walking up a tree, and it's very white on its back where its tail begins. Oh! do hear it laugh, Nat." And the Flicker, the big Woodpecker with golden lining to its wings, for it was he, gave out peal after peal of his jolly call-note. "Can't we go in now to ask Uncle Roy the names of these birds, and see if he won't begin our book this afternoon?"
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