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Updated: June 28, 2025
Some resemble the lark, and, indeed, there are several of that family; two have notes not unlike those of the thrush. One brought the chaffinch to my mind, and another the robin; but their songs are intermixed with several curious abrupt notes unlike any thing English. One utters deliberately "peek, pak, pok"; another has a single note like a stroke on a violin-string.
By-and-by a chaffinch boldly raised his voice, ending with the old story, 'Sweet, will you, will you kiss me dear? Then there came a hoar-frost, and the earth, which had been black, became white, as its evaporated vapours began to gather and drops of rain to fall. Even then the obstinate weather refused to quite yield, wrapping its cloak, as it were, around it in bitter enmity.
The Lapwing, when in its territory, displays hostility towards other males of its own species, but when upon neutral ground, treats them with indifference; the Chiffchaff pursues its rival up to the boundary and is then apparently satisfied that its object has been achieved; the cock Chaffinch in March permits no other male to intrude upon its acre or so of ground during the early hours of the morning, but for the rest of the day it joins the flock and is sociable; the Herring-Gull resents the approach of strangers so long as it occupies its few square feet of cliff, but welcomes companions whilst it is following the plough all of which points to a relation between the territory and the fighting.
The spring in the copse, which does not freeze in winter, is declared free and open to all travellers, not exceeding fifty in number. The unjust annexations of the late King Kapchack are hereby repudiated, and all the provinces declared independent. Lastly, peace is proclaimed for ever and a day, beginning to-morrow. Phu, the starling. Tchink, the chaffinch. Te-te, the tomtit. Ulu, the hare.
White took note of the ongoings of the seasons in and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in the tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectory eaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinch and hedge-sparrow, was eaves-dropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here I keep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many a pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out of what I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitary as the spider weaves his web in the darkened corner.
"The wren builds in an ivied thorn Or old and ruined wall, The mossy nest so covered in You scarce can see at all. "The martins build their nests of clay In rows beneath the eaves; The silvery lichens, moss, and hair The chaffinch interweaves. "The cuckoo makes no nest at all, But through the wood she strays. Until she finds one snug and warm, And there her eggs she lays.
An old maid stood by the window: she had hung the cage with green chickweed; and a little chaffinch hopped from perch to perch, and sang and twittered merrily enough.
In his ‘Envious Man,’ Gowing made ‘axeth’ to rhyme with ‘taxeth.’ No word is more common in Suffolk than ‘fare’; a pony is a ‘hobby’; a thrush is a ‘mavis’; a chest is a ‘kist’; a shovel is a ‘skuppet’; a chaffinch is a ‘spink.’ If a man is upset in his mind, he tells us he is ‘wholly stammed,’ and the Suffolk ‘yow’ is at least as old as Chaucer, who wrote: ‘What do you ye do there, quod she, Come, and if it lyke yow To daucen daunceth with us now.’
He received thirty sous per day, and for a month he returned to his lodgings gay as a chaffinch, and affable toward his master. When the wind of adversity began to blow upon the housekeeping of the Rue des Fossoyeurs that is to say, when the forty pistoles of King Louis XIII were consumed or nearly so he commenced complaints which Athos thought nauseous, Porthos indecent, and Aramis ridiculous.
Then for a long time he was only vaguely conscious of more light than usual in the room of an open window somewhere of rustling leaves outside and of a chaffinch singing.... Another couple of days passed, and he began to question the kind woman whom he had come to regard as a sort of strong, protective force between him and anguish, without any desire to give it a name, or realize an individual.
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