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Updated: May 28, 2025
Let us be off with all speed. A mile away, I know a flinty waste beloved of the wheatear and the locust. Here reigns perfect calm; moreover, there are some clumps of evergreen oak which will lend me their scanty shade. I take my book, a few sheets of paper and a pencil and fly to this solitude. What beauteous silence, what exquisite quiet!
A very common summer visitant to all the Islands, arriving in March and departing again in October, none remaining through the winter at least, I have never seen a Wheatear in the Islands as late as November on any occasion. In the Vale, where a great many breed, the young began to make their appearance out of the nest and flying about, but still fed by their parents, about the 16th of June.
The stronger-winged wheatear was more fortunate, since he comes in March, and before that spell of deadly weather he was already back in his breeding haunts on Salisbury Plain, and, in fact, everywhere on that open down country.
The storm over I continued my rambles on Whitesheet Hill, and coming back an hour or two later to the very spot where I had seen and followed the wheatear, I all at once caught sight of a second bird, lying dead on the turf close to my feet! The sudden sight gave me a shock of astonishment, mingled with admiration and grief.
Her manner was exceptional; but, if we must lose the curtsey, and the rural little ones cease to mimic that pretty drooping motion of the nightingale, the kitty wren, and wheatear, cannot our village pastors and masters teach them some less startling and offensive form of salutation than the loud "Hullo!" with which they are accustomed to greet the stranger within their gates?
Professor Ansted includes the Whinchat in his list, and marks it as occurring in Guernsey and Sark. There is no specimen in the Museum. WHEATEAR. Saxicola Oenanthe, Linnaeus. French, "Motteux cul blanc," "Traquet moteux."
And it was a male, undoubtedly the mate of the wheatear I had seen at the spot, and its little mate, not knowing what death is, had probably been keeping watch near it, wondering at its strange stillness and greatly fearing for its safety when I came that way, and passed by without seeing it.
The Black, or Tithys Redstart, as it is sometimes called, is a regular and by no means uncommon autumnal visitant to Guernsey. It seems very much to take the place of the Wheatear, arriving about the time the Wheatear departs, and mostly frequenting the same places. In Guernsey it is most common near the sea about the low part of the Island, from L'ancresse Common to Perrelle Bay.
In this way the males of all the Warblers that breed commonly in Great Britain establish themselves, each one in its respective station at the respective breeding ground; so, too, do those of many other migrants for example, the Whinchat, Wheatear, Tree-Pipit, and Red-backed Shrike.
It is in the cloaca, the chamber common to the oviduct and the intestine, that the bird wraps its egg in a calcareous shell, often decorating it with magnificent hues: olive-green for the Nightingale, sky-blue for the Wheatear, soft pink for the Icterine Warbler. It is in the cloaca also that the Clythra and the Cryptocephalus produce the elegant armour of their eggs.
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