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It is commoner here, and is sometimes very destructive, its powerful beak making havoc with the "marrowfats"; but, though I am partial to green peas of this description, I would sooner suffer some damage than have the hawfinches shot. In 1918 the cuckoos were exceedingly numerous here, and round my house they were calling all day long.
Around the interior of the entwined sapling tops that formed the fatal bower of death there hung a semicircle of tiny cages containing live decoys, chaffinches, hawfinches, titmice and several other species. "The older and staider ones call repeatedly," says Mr. Astley, "and the chaffinches break into song. It is the only song to be heard in Italy at the time of the autum migration."
It was Ivan Cheprakov, my school friend, who was expelled, when he was in the second class, for smoking. Once, during the autumn, we were out catching goldfinches, starlings, and hawfinches, to sell them in the market early in the morning when our parents were still asleep.
Flocks composed of Yellow Buntings, Cirl Buntings, Corn-Buntings, Chaffinches, Greenfinches, etc., can be observed round the farmsteads or upon arable land; small flocks of Reed-Buntings take up their abode on pieces of waste land and remain there until the supply of food is exhausted, deserting their feeding ground only towards evening when they retire to the nearest reed-bed to pass the night; flocks of Hawfinches visit the same holly-trees day after day so long as there is an abundance of berries on the ground beneath; and so on.
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