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The big day was over, and the old cock-pheasant was alone with the melancholy song of a single robin, and a chaffinch calling "Chink!"
Hadria performed it for him. The chaffinch flew off with the booty. "There is no suffering so horrible as that which involves remorse or self-contempt," he said, and his voice trembled. "To have to settle down to look upon some part of one's action, of one's moral self, with shame or scorn, is almost intolerable." "Quite intolerable!"
The Yellow Hammer is included in Professor Ansted's list, and marked as occurring in Guernsey and Sark. There are also a pair in the Museum. CHAFFINCH. Fringilla caelebs, Linnaeus. French, "Pinson ordinaire," "Grosbec pinson." The Chaffinch is resident, tolerably common, and generally distributed throughout the Islands, but is nowhere so common as in England.
The greenfinches have been by me all the while. A bullfinch pipes now and then further up the hedge where the brambles and thorns are thickest. Boldest of birds to look at, he is always in hiding. The shrill tone of a goldfinch came just now from the ash branches, but he has gone on. Every four or five minutes a chaffinch sings close by, and another fills the interval near the gateway.
"Hear, hear," said the stoat. "Capital," said the chaffinch. "Old Spectacles can always see a way out of a difficulty." "Haw!" said the rook. "I'm doubtful. Perhaps the weasel will not see it in this light." "Buzz," said the humble-bee, just then returning. "Gentlemen, I have seen the weasel. His lordship was lying on a bank in the sun he is very ill indeed.
Watching the line of the hedge, about every two minutes, either near at hand or yonder a bird darts out just at the level of the grass, hovers a second with labouring wings, and returns as swiftly to the cover. Sometimes it is a flycatcher, sometimes a greenfinch, or chaffinch, now and then a robin, in one place a shrike, perhaps another is a redstart.
She went out to the woods, and sat, shadowed by the long bent branch; watching mechanically the slow rounding and yellowing of the beam of sunlight over the thick floor of moss, up against the fir-stems. The chaffinch and the linnet flitted off the grey orchard twigs, singing from new stations; and the bee seemed to come questioning the silence of the woods and droning disappointed away.
Down from his perch he came, but no sooner had he touched his feet to the ground than the blackbird went straight at him with extraordinary fury. The chaffinch, taken by surprise, was buffeted and knocked over, then, recovering himself, fled in consternation, hotly pursued by the sick one.
About five minutes passed, then the hunted blackbird returned, and, going to the identical spot from which he had been driven, composed himself to rest; only now he sat facing his lively little enemy. I was astonished to see him back; so, apparently, was the chaffinch. He started, craned his neck, and regarded his adversary first with one eye then with the other.
Now the immature Reed-Bunting, though to our ears its song is but a poor representation of that of the adult, gains a mate; the Yellow Bunting pairs, and the discharge of the sexual function may even have taken place before its voice attains what we judge to be its full development; and there are no grounds for supposing that the Donegal Chaffinch, with its less musical notes, has on that account any the less chance of procreating its kind facts which demonstrate that the biological value of song is neither to be sought in the purity of tone, nor in the variety and combination of phrases, nor, indeed, in any of those qualities by which the human voice gains or loses merit, and which leave us with no alternative but to dismiss from our minds all æsthetic considerations in the attempt to estimate its true significance.
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