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Unlike Wordsworth, Tennyson does not regard nature as a manifestation of the divine spirit of love. He sees her more from the new scientific point of view, as "red in tooth and claw with rapine." The hero of Maud says: "For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by the shrike.
I had nothing to say against the singing, since the shrike will often twitter by the half hour in the very coldest weather. But further discussion concerning the bird's identity was soon rendered needless; for, while we were talking, along came a sparrow, and dropped carelessly into a hawthorn bush, right under the shrike's perch.
The shrike wiped his beak upon the branches, cast an eye down at me and at his lost mouse, and then flew away. He was a remarkably fine specimen, his breast and under parts as white as snow, and his coat of black and ashen gray appearing very bright and fresh.
But you lose out on that side even when you think you've won. You get exactly what you go after, but you don't get any more, and so you lose out. Why? Because you're an egg-sucker and a nest-robber and a shrike, and a four-flusher and a piker, that's why! "The first road don't give you anything you can put your hands on; except that you think and hope maybe there's that light at the end of it.
As the Red-backed Shrike frequently returns to the same place every year, I expected again to find this bird, and perhaps the female and the nest this year, 1878, about the Vallon, but I could see nothing of either birds or nest, though I searched both inside and outside the Vallon grounds. Young Mr.
He is not classed with singing birds, and is not, I think, usually credited with being musical. But Thoreau speaks of his song, and others mention it. John Burroughs tells of a shrike singing in his vicinity in winter, "a crude broken warble," "saluting the sun as a robin might have done." Winter, indeed, seems to be his chosen time for singing, and an ornithologist in St.
"I didn't know he was such a handsome bird." Unfortunately, the shrike soon flew away, and passing linnets dropped down, drawn to the spot by the twitterings of their caged fellows, and were caught; and so it went on for a couple of hours, we conversing amicably during the waiting intervals. For now he regarded me as a friend of the bird-catcher.
Shells, difference in form of, in male and female Gasteropoda; beautiful colours and shapes of. Shield-drake, pairing with a common duck; New Zealand, sexes and young of. Shooter, J., on the Kaffirs; on the marriage-customs of the Kaffirs. Shrew-mice, odour of. Shrike, Drongo. Shrikes, characters of young. Shuckard, W.E., on sexual differences in the wings of Hymenoptera.
Save in a few cases, therefore, the Shrike does not collect the dead and withered remains: it is from the growing plants that he reaps his harvest, mowing them down with his beak and leaving the sheaves to dry in the sun before using them. I caught him one day hopping about and pecking at the twigs of a Biscayan bindweed. He was getting in his hay, strewing the ground with it.
Albans says that in that season he sings by the hour in the streets of the town. Therefore did I sit unobtrusively on the near side of the thorn-tree, leaving the birds their screen, to encourage them to sing; and at last I had my reward. One very hot day I did not reach my place under the maple till after nine o'clock, and I found the shrike, as I frequently did, on the fence, on guard.
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