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Updated: June 15, 2025
But now, in the path before the arbour, all facing towards it, there must have been a score of birds three or four sparrows, a pair of chaffinches, and then greenfinches, greenfinches, greenfinches. They were all facing expectantly towards the arbour, hopping towards it, hesitating, hopping on again, coming nearer, nearer.
Warblers and willow wrens sing out of sight among the trees; they are easily hidden by a leaf; ivy-leaves are so smooth, with an enamelled surface, that high up, as the wind moves them, they reflect the sunlight and scintillate. Greenfinches in the elms never cease love-making, and love-making needs much soft talking.
And why should there be so many sorts of birds, all robbing the garden at once? Thrushes, and blackbirds, and sparrows, and chaffinches, and greenfinches, and bullfinches, and tomtits. And there are four kinds of tomtits round here, remember: but we may go on with such talk for ever. Wiser men than we have asked the same question: but Lady Why will not answer them yet.
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.
Thousands of birds, the lories, and greenfinches, and gold-winged pigeons, not to speak of the noisy paroquets, flew about in the green branches. Below, on the bosom of the water, were a couple of shy and unapproachable black swans. This rara avis of the Australian rivers soon disappeared among the windings of the Wimerra, which water the charming landscape in the most capricious manner.
If the goldfinches, and the thrushes, and blackbirds, and robins, and greenfinches, and sparrows, and so on, were so meek as to submit to be excluded, and were content to have no voice in the matter till they were called upon to obey orders, that was their affair. They were a bevy of poor-spirited, mean things. He was not going to be put down like that.
In the newly-sown fields of grain the birds frequently find a supply of food. Here Yellow Buntings, Greenfinches, and Chaffinches collect from the surrounding neighbourhood. The majority are somewhere in possession of territories, and not a few are paired. Between the territories and the feeding ground a highway is formed by individuals passing to and fro.
Many times the bees have returned to their hives, and thus the index of the day advances. It is nothing to the greenfinches; all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny moment is to them all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know whether it is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling, for joy, for love.
Here, among the more sober and unassuming of the numerous family, the visitor will notice the common sparrow that chirps cheerfully through the smoke of London alleys; the brown linnet with its lively notes; the gayer goldfinches, greenfinches, chaffinches, the North American songfinch, and the many varieties of the buntings, including the epicure's ortolans that are found in various parts of the world.
The singing linnets come in parties, the happy greenfinches, the streaked yellow-hammers, as if any one had delicately painted them in separate streaks, and not with a wash of colour, the brown buntings, chaffinches out they come from the hazel copses, where the nuts are dropping, and the hedge berries turning red, and every one finds something to his liking.
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