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On a hot summer's day it is wearisome enough for the lonely angler to listen to the river crawling lazily through the rocks that choke his bed, mingled with the clocking of some water-moved boulder, and the chick-chick of the stonechat, or the scream of the golden plover overhead.
'Soldier or shepherd, what matter now she is gone? and rising to his feet and coming down the sloping lawn, overflowing with the shade of the larches, he climbed through the hawthorns growing out of a crumbled wall, and once at the edge of the lake, he stood waiting for nothing seemingly but to hear the tiresome clanking call of the stonechat, and he compared its reiterated call with the words 'atonement, 'forgiveness, 'death, 'calamity, words always clanking in his heart, for she might be lying at the bottom of the lake, and some day a white phantom would rise from the water and claim him.
The brightest bird on the Downs was then the stonechat. Perched on a dead thistle, his blackest of black heads, the white streak by his neck, and the brilliance of his colouring contrasted with the yellow gorse around. In the hedges on the northern slopes of the Downs, towards the Weald, or plain, the wayfaring tree grows in large shrubs, blooming among the thorns.
It is difficult to put oneself in the place of the Stonechat or of the Whinchat. But even after making due allowance for the danger inseparable from any attempt to do so, there remains the unquestionable fact that whereas the impulse to attack was strong in the one, the impulse to defend itself was wholly lacking in the other.
High up in the air a hawk hovered in spiral circles, eyeing the ground below. Miriam broke off some lotus-buds and threw them at the stonechat, which flew away, but kept its beak still pointing towards the rushes.
This, indeed, was shown by its subsequent behaviour, for whenever a Tit became temporarily detached from its companions it hesitated no longer but forthwith attacked. There are other species which are no less aggressive than the Warblers the Chats for example. The Stonechat regards with suspicion almost any bird of its own size, and will even pursue a Tree-Pipit if it approaches too closely.
Blyth, E., on the structure of the hand in the species of Hylobates; observations on Indian crows; on the development of the horns in the Koodoo and Eland antelopes; on the pugnacity of the males of Gallicrex cristatus; on the presence of spurs in the female Euplocamus erythrophthalmus; on the pugnacity of the amadavat; on the spoonbill; on the moulting of Anthus; on the moulting of bustards, plovers, and Gallus bankiva; on the Indian honey-buzzard; on sexual differences in the colour of the eyes of hornbills; on Oriolus melanocephalus; on Palaeornis javanicus; on the genus Ardetta; on the peregrine falcon; on young female birds acquiring male characters; on the immature plumage of birds; on representative species of birds; on the young of Turnix; on anomalous young of Lanius rufus and Colymbus glacialis; on the sexes and young of the sparrows; on dimorphism in some herons; on the ascertainment of the sex of nestling bullfinches by pulling out breast-feathers; on orioles breeding in immature plumage; on the sexes and young of Buphus and Anastomus; on the young of the blackcap and blackbird; on the young of the stonechat; on the white plumage of Anastomus; on the horns of Bovine animals; on the horns of Antilope bezoartica; on the mode of fighting of Ovis cycloceros; on the voice of the Gibbons; on the crest of the male wild goat; on the colours of Portax picta; on the colours of Antilope bezoartica; on the colour of the Axis deer; on sexual difference of colour in Hylobates hoolock; on the hog-deer; on the beard and whiskers in a monkey, becoming white with age.
Such is the nature of the warfare which prevails between neighbouring pairs, and which can be observed in the life of many other species the Chaffinch, Stonechat, Blackbird, Partridge, Jay, to mention but a few. The conflicts between males that are definitely paired are of such common occurrence that it is scarcely necessary to mention specific instances.
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