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Updated: May 5, 2025
The trees are already leafless, and on a naked branch sits the little garden-warbler with its rust-brown breast like a withered leaf left hanging and repeats untiringly a little fragment which it remembers of its spring-song. The only thriving thing in the whole picture is the ivy; for ivy, like sorrow, is fresh both summer and winter.
The wood-wren, the willow-wren, and the garden-warbler had nested in the thickets, and every evening I had visited the place to pry on their doings, and to note how the flowers in glad succession blossomed and faded their presence in this lonely sanctuary known only to myself, and to the birds, bees, and butterflies, and to the little shrews that rustled over the dry leaves beneath.
All the Warblers are exceedingly pugnacious, the fighting being especially severe between those that are very closely related. The Blackcap and the Garden-Warbler are constant rivals, and the scenes which can be witnessed when the two meet in competition are interesting from many points of view.
And if we are satisfied that the fighting in the one case is purposive, so, too, must we regard it as having some biological purpose to serve in the other. But the Garden-Warbler is not the only bird that acts as a stimulus to the instinct of the Blackcap; Whitethroats are often attacked, and the Chiffchaff is a source of irritation.
Occasionally there may be a scuffle, perhaps between a Blackcap and a Lesser Whitethroat, or between a Garden-Warbler and a Blackcap, but it is of short duration and lacks vigour. Apart, however, from such temporary disturbances, there is no real rupture in their relations, and certainly nothing to lead one to suppose that the bickerings are determined by the functioning of any specific instinct.
Nor was this scarcity in the village only; it was everywhere, as I found when able to get out for a few hours during my two spring seasons in the place. Close by were the extensive woods of Trevalloe, where I was struck by the extraordinary silence and where I listened in vain for a single note from blackcap, garden-warbler, willow-wren, wood-wren, or redstart.
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