LONDON: MARTIN SECKER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI NOTE These sketches of birds, each appropriate to one month of the twelve, originally appeared in The Outlook , to the Editor and Proprietors of which review I am indebted for permission to reprint them in book form. F. G. A. Easter , 1914....

As birds are to be considered throughout these pages from any standpoint but that of sport, much that is of interest in connection with a bird essentially the sportsman's must necessarily be omitted. At the same time, although this gorgeous creature, the chief attraction of social gatherings throughout the winter months, appeals chiefly to the men who shoot and eat it, it is not uninteresting to the naturalist with opportunities for studying its habits under conditions more favourable than those

There are many reasons why the woodcock should be prized by the winter sportsman more than any other bird in the bag. In the first place, there is its scarcity. Half a dozen to every hundred pheasants would in most parts of the country be considered a proportion at which none could grumble, and there are many days on which not one is either seen or shot. Again, there is the bird's twisting flight, which, particularly inside the covert, makes it anything but an easy target. Third and last, it is

The woodpigeon is many things to many men. To the farmer, who has some claim to priority of verdict, it is a curse, even as the rabbit in Australia, the lemming in Norway, or the locust in Algeria. The tiller of the soil, whose business brings him in open competition with the natural appetites of such voracious birds, beasts, or insects, regards his rivals from a standpoint which has no room for sentiment; and the woodpigeons are to our farmers, particularly in the well-wooded districts of the W

All March the rooks were busy in the swaying elms, but it is these softer evenings of April, when the first young leaves are beginning to frame the finished nests, and the boisterous winds of last month no longer drown the babble of the tree-top parliament at the still hour when farm labourers are homing from the fields, that the rooks peculiarly strike their own note in the country scene. There is no good reason to confuse these curious and interesting fowl with any other of the crow family. Co

With the single exception of the nightingale, bird of lovers, no other has been more written of in prose or verse than the so-called "harbinger of spring." This is a foolish name for a visitor that does not reach our shores before, at any rate, the middle of April. Even Whitaker allows us to recognise the coming of spring nearly a month earlier; and for myself, impatient if only for the illusion of Nature's awakening, I date my spring from the ending of the shortest day. Once the days begin to l

The majority of nocturnal animals, more particularly those bent on spoliation, are strangely silent. True, frogs croak in the marshes, bats shrill overhead at so high a pitch that some folks cannot hear them, and owls hoot from their ruins in a fashion that some vote melodious and romantic, while others associate the sound rather with midnight crime and dislike it accordingly. The badger, on the other hand, with the otter and fox—all of them sad thieves from our point of view—have learnt, whatev

When the trout-fisherman sees the first martins and swallows dipping over the sward of the water-meadows and skimming the surface of the stream in hot pursuit of such harried water-insects as have escaped the jaws of greedy fish, he knows that summer is coming in. The signs of spring have been evident in the budding hedgerows for some weeks. The rooks are cawing in the elms, the cuckoo's note has been heard in the spinney for some time before these little visitors pass in jerky flight up and dow

So glorious is the flight of the seagull that it tempts us to fling aside the dry-as-dust theories of mechanism of flexed wings, coefficient of air resistance, and all the abracadabra of the mathematical biologist, and just to give thanks for a sight so inspiring as that of gulls ringing high in the eye of the wind over hissing combers that break on sloping beaches or around jagged rocks. These birds are one with the sea, knowing no fear of that protean monster which, since earth's beginning, ha

More than one of our summer visitors, like the nightingale and cuckoo, are less often seen than heard, but certainly the most secretive hider of them all is the landrail. This harsh-voiced bird reaches our shores in May, and it was on the last of that month that I lately heard its rasping note in a quiet park not a mile out of a busy market town on the Welsh border, and forgave its monotone because, more emphatically than even the cuckoo's dissyllable, it announced that, at last, "summer was icu

Music , vocal or otherwise, is always a matter of taste, and individual appreciation of birdsong varies like the rest. One man finds the cuckoo's cry intolerably wearisome. Another sees no romance in the gargling of doves, while comparatively few care for the piercing scream of the starling or the rasping note of the corncrake. Yet few birds perform to a more hostile audience than the owl. I say advisedly "the owl," since the vast majority of people make no distinction whatever between our three

Had these notes been written from the standpoint of sport, the three familiar groups of birds, which together make up this world-wide aquatic family, might better have borne their alternative title "wildfowl" with its covert sneer at the hand-reared pheasant and artificially encouraged partridge that, between them, furnish so much comfortable sport to those with no fancy for the arduous business of the mudflats. It is true that, of late years, the mallard has, in experienced hands, made a welcom

Of all the old proverbs that are open to argument, few offer more material for criticism than that which has it that a good name is more easily lost than won; and if ever a living creature served to illustrate the converse to the proverbial dog with a bad name, that creature is the companionable little bird that we peculiarly associate with Christmas. Traditionally, the robin is a gentle little fellow of pious associations and with a tender fancy for covering the unburied dead with leaves; but i