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Updated: May 25, 2025
After this, I am rather glad to report that the esteemed table-delicacies, pheasants and partridges, don't get on well in New Zealand; nor do turtle-doves. The thrush is spreading and meets with the approval of the hypercritical New Zealander. The hedge-sparrow, the chaffinch and the goldfinch have flourished abundantly, but the linnet has failed.
That bird knew more geography than people will ever know. PEOPLE, Golly! I suppose if people ever learn to fly like any common hedge-sparrow we shall never hear the end of it!" "You're a wise old bird," said the Doctor. "How old are you really? I know that parrots and elephants sometimes live to be very, very old." "I can never be quite sure of my age," said Polynesia.
Listening to the music of prayer and praise, with some natural outdoor sound to fill up the pauses the distant crow of a cock or the song of some bird close by a corn-bunting or wren or hedge-sparrow and the bright sunlight filling the interior, I felt as much refreshed as if kind nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep, had visited me that morning.
Always graceful, always sweet, he keeps perfect delicacy in his most utter carelessness. And why should we overlook, common though he be, yon hedge-sparrow, who is singing so modestly, and yet so firmly and so true? Or cock- robin himself, who is here, as everywhere, honest, self-confident, and cheerful?
Dead silence reigned over the garden, and Cold, with a capital C, gripped the land. Heaven help any bird who roosted on an empty stomach on such a night! It would freeze to its perch before morning, most like. Indeed, our thrush had a neighbor, a hedge-sparrow just newly arrived from "somewhere up north." It had come in after dark, and therefore had no time to feed.
He would not for worlds scare the poor little prisoners who cheer his lonely hours, and who have long since ceased to fear him. A turtle-dove takes peas, and a hedge-sparrow picks ants' eggs from his lips; a white-throat perches on his left hand to snatch a caterpillar from his right. The huge man was in his garden soon after sunrise gathering the dewy leaves for his feathered pets.
The hedges in that part are kept cut and trimmed so closely that they seemed less like hedges than mere faint greyish fences of brushwood, dividing field from field: they would not have afforded shelter to a hedge-sparrow.
The autumn air is crystal about me. The strokes of my drill ring steady and even. Asop looks at me with wondering eyes. Wave after wave of content swells through my breast. No one knows that I am here among the lonely hills. The birds of passage have gone; a happy journey and welcome back again! Titmouse and blackcap and a hedge-sparrow or so live now alone in the bush and undergrowth: tuitui!
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.
Some idea of how blind it is may be formed by imagining a case in widely separated types of our own species, which would be a parallel to that of the cuckoo and hedge-sparrow.
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