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Updated: June 24, 2025
While talking, a wheatear flew past, and alighted near the path a place they frequent. The opinion seems general that wheatears are not so numerous as they used to be. You can always see two or three on the Downs in autumn, but the shepherd said years ago he had heard of one man catching seventy dozen in a day.
There is scarce a gurgle or a bubble, but the solid timbers are polished and smooth where the storms have worn them with pebbles. From a grassy spot ahead a bird rises, marked with white, and another follows it; they are wheatears; they frequent the land by the low beach in the autumn. A shrill but feeble pipe is the cry of the sandpiper, disturbed on his moist feeding-ground.
Earlier than that in the summer there was not a wheatfield where you could not find numerous wheatears picked as clean as if threshed where they stood. In some places, the wheat was quite thinned. Later in the year there seems a movement of small birds from the lower to the higher lands.
The last relic of Art carving is visible round about a bread platter, here and there wreaths of wheatears; very suitable these to a platter bearing bread formed of corn. Alas! I touched one of these platters one day to feel the grain of the wood, and it was cold earthenware cold, ungenial, repellent crockery, a mockery, sham!
Five years before, the rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows at that spot. When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them.
Such as these they flaunt not, but wear for choiceness. You would not see them unless you knew them there. For denizens they have the hare, the fox, and the badger. Redwings, wheatears, peewits, and airy kestrels are the people of their skies. I love above all the solitude they keep, and to feel the pulsing of the untenanted air.
In all, there were twenty-four Whitethroats, nine Willow-Warblers, eight Sedge-Warblers, and six Wheatears; and on dissection it was found that twenty Whitethroats, seven Willow-Warblers, eight Sedge-Warblers, and one Wheatear were males. What a curious departure this seems from the usual custom in the animal world!
Pullets, fowls, chickens, rabbits, pigeons, green geese, leverets, turkey poults, plovers, wheatears, and geese in September. Fish. Cod, haddock, flounders, plaice, skate, thornback, mullets, pike, carp, eels, shellfish, except oysters; mackarel the first two months, but are not good in August. Vegetables. Beans, peas, French beans, and various others. Fruit.
But at midsummer, above the opening wheatears, the heaven from the east to the zenith is flushed with it. At noonday, as the light breeze comes over, the wheat rustles the more because the stalks are stiffening and swing from side to side from the root instead of yielding up the stem. Stay now at every gateway and lean over while the midsummer hum sounds above.
In this way the creatures are being extirpated, and one can foresee that when hares and rabbits are no more, and even the small birds of the plain, larks, pipits, wheatears, stonechats, and whincats, have vanished, the hunters in khaki will take to the chase of yet smaller creatures crane-flies and butterflies and dragon-flies, and even the fantastic, elusive hover-flies which the hunters of little game will perhaps think the most entertaining fly of all.
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