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While talking, a wheatear flew past, and alighted near the path a place they frequent. The opinion seems general that wheatears are not so numerous as they used to be. You can always see two or three on the Downs in autumn, but the shepherd said years ago he had heard of one man catching seventy dozen in a day.
This is probably because in Guernsey the Wheatear has a great partiality for laying its eggs under large slabs and boulders of granite perfectly immovable; the stones forming one of the Druids' altars in the Vale, were made use of to cover a nest when I was there. REED WARBLER. Acrocephalus streperus, Vieillot. French, "Rousserolle effarvatte," "Bec-fin des roseaux."
Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear, the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not even ask for a bush to perch on?
In the stillness here, under the roof of the wind so high above, the sound of the sand draining itself is audible. From the cliff blocks of chalk have fallen, leaving hollows as when a knot drops from a beam. They lie crushed together at the base, and on the point of this jagged ridge a wheatear perches.
In all, there were twenty-four Whitethroats, nine Willow-Warblers, eight Sedge-Warblers, and six Wheatears; and on dissection it was found that twenty Whitethroats, seven Willow-Warblers, eight Sedge-Warblers, and one Wheatear were males. What a curious departure this seems from the usual custom in the animal world!
Keats, no doubt, in one at least of his unequalled odes, does depart from the scheme of structure indicated by the opening stanza, and without any apparent metrical need for so doing. But the poem does not gain by the departure. Another blemish of a minor kind in the ‘Ode to a Star’ is that of rhyming “meteor” with “wheatear.”
In habits it puts one very much in mind of the Wheatear, being very fond, like that bird, of selecting some big stone or some other conspicuous place to perch on and keep a look-out either for intruders or for some passing insect, either flying or creeping, for it is an entirely insect-feeding bird.
Close by there was a small round hillock, an old forsaken nest of the little brown ants, green and soft with moss and small creeping herbs a suitable grave for a wheatear. Cutting out a round piece of turf from the side, I made a hole with my stick and put the dead bird in and replacing the turf left it neatly buried.
Not even an insect could I see, although the furze was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look "unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does. "Not even a wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.
Wood-pigeons call from the hedges, and blackbirds whistle in the trees; the sweet delicious rain refreshes them as it does the corn. Thunder mutters in the distance, and the electric atmosphere rapidly draws the wheat up higher. A few days' sunshine and the first wheatear appears. Very likely there are others near, but standing with their hood of green leaf towards you, and therefore hidden.
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