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This one produced unexpectedly a pair of sedge-warblers and a reed-warbler, atoms who gyrated and grated their annoyance; a willow-tit, who made needle-point rebukes; a water-rail, with a long beak and long legs, running away like a long-legged pullet; a moorhen very much concerned as to her nest; a big rat very much concerned as to the moorhen's nest, too, but in a different way; a grass snake, who glistened as if newly painted in the sun; and a spotted crake, who is even more of a running winged ventriloquial mystery than the corn-crake of our childhood's hay-times.
The young woodpeckers are therefore shut in very tightly and safely. The parent birds run up and down the trees seeking for insects, on which they live. To see them run straight up a tree as a cat would do is very curious; but they are shy birds, and not often seen. Other birds, like the reed-warbler, build in reeds; this seems a very safe plan.
She walked back at a slow pace, and sung to herself above her darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed-warbler on the branch beside the night-stream; a simple song of a lighthearted sound, independent of the shifting black and grey of the flood underneath. A step was at her heels. "I see you have been petting my scapegrace." "Mr. Whitford! Yes; not petting, I hope. I tried to give him a lecture.
Here in Worcestershire, the Arundo phragmites grows mainly on certain sheets of water which are comparatively few and far between, and the Reed-Warbler is consequently restricted to isolated and more or less confined areas.
During the year of the Great Exhibition milk was very scarce, and this grass, which was excellent for the stable-fed cows, fetched great prices. In the summer the willows, full of leaf, and exactly appropriate to the flat lacustrine outline of the eyot and the reach, are full of birds, though the reed-warbler does not always return. He was absent last year.
And not a bird was seen or heard, neither rail nor water-hen, wag-tail nor reed-warbler. Of this horrible quagmire, the worst upon all Exmoor, John had heard from his grandfather, and even from his mother, when they wanted to keep him quiet; but his father had feared to speak of it to him, being a man of piety, and up to the tricks of the evil one.
To enjoy the sensation I went out and sat down, and listened alone to the liquid rippling, warbling sound of the swift-flowing streamlet that sweet low music of running water to which the reed-warbler had listened thousands of years ago, striving to imitate it, until his running rippling song was perfect.
What could be more unlike than the songs of the Willow-Warbler and of the Chiffchaff, of the Marsh-Warbler and the Reed-Warbler, or of the Yellow Bunting and the Cirl Bunting?
Neither the Marsh-Warbler nor the Reed-Warbler will tolerate strangers within the small space of ground over which they exercise dominion. Of the two, the Marsh-Warbler is perhaps the more pugnacious, and will attack any other Warbler that approaches too closely; Whitethroats are often pursued and driven away, and less frequently, Garden-Warblers.
On the other hand, the Sedge-Warbler is most aggressive towards other kindred species, and when a male happens to occupy the same ground as a Reed-Warbler, there are frequent battles between them and incessant commotion; they fly at one another and meet in the air with an audible clicking of bills, or pursue one another amongst the reeds, each one uttering its characteristic scolding note.
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