BY PHIL   ROBINSON AUTHOR OF “ NOAH’S ARK ” “ THE POETS’ BIRDS ” ETC. Illustrated by Charles Whymper AND OTHERS LONDON ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED 15 & 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN 1894   Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. London and Edinburgh The Birds of the Seasons—Some Birds of Passage—The Miracle of Migration—The Thrush—The Blackbird—What is the Meaning of Singing?—The Swallow Pp. 11-43 The Birds of the Months—Some Rare Birds and Some Common—January and the Fieldfare—

The Birds of the Seasons—Some Birds of Passage—The Miracle of Migration—The Thrush—The Blackbird—What is the meaning of Singing?—The Swallow...

I F we had to distribute the Seasons among the birds that are called “British,” selecting a notable fowl to represent each, we could hardly overlook the claims of the cuckoo, the nightingale, and the swallow to distinction. But, after all, these are not “thorough Britons.” They only come to us for our summer, and when that goes they follow it. Though great numbers of them are British-born, they are at best only Anglo-Continental, Anglo-Asiatic, Anglo-African, and Inter-Oceanic. But our resourcef

The Birds of the Months—Some Rare Birds and some Common—January and the Fieldfare—February and the Rook—March, April, May, with the Thrush, Swallow and Nightingale—The Terrors of Migration—June and the Ring-dove—A Wood-pigeon Problem—The Dotterel—Evening Voices: The Night-jars—July and the Skylark—August, September, with Grouse and Partridge—The Ptarmigan—The old Cock-pheasant—November and the Woodcock—December with its Robin and Wren...

I T is easy, taking a score of birds, to construct a bird-calendar, a zodiac of birds, that comes very near the actual truths, and almost exhausts the list of more notable land-fowl. There are some, like the heron or the bittern, the curlew, the woodpecker, or the coot, that are not significant of any particular time and season, because they are not sufficiently familiar. It is only by some fortunate accident and in particular places that you may hear the lonely cry of or the bittern It is a ver

The Rook—The Cuckoo—Lark and Woodlark—The Sparrow—Plague of Birds...

O NCE upon a time rooks were called crows, and as the latter had a very evil reputation, the former suffered for it. Nor is the confusion still extinct, for unfortunately there are obstinate people in the world who will not understand that it makes any difference whether they use a right name or a wrong one. It will be very long before the water-vole ceases to be called a water-rat; but until that time comes, an innocent animal will continue to be persecuted for a guilty one. So with the honest

Bird-Voices—The Corn-crake—The Black-Tap—the Turtle-Dove—Carpenter-Birds—The Nuthatch—The Wryneck—The Great Tit—The Letter-box Tit of Rowfant...

W HICH bird-voice in Nature is the most expressive? Is it the ringdove’s happy crooning in the green depths of the woodland? or the nightingale’s solitary lamenting under the cold moon? Some might say the fierce, ringing cry of the Highlanders’ eagle among the clouds; others the soothing, homely clamour of the social rooks in the old Hampshire elms. Or is it some other? For myself, I think I would pass them all by, significant utterances though they are, like the cuckoo’s tell-tale note, the spa

The Owl—The Magpie—The Kestrel or Windhover—Haunts of the Heron—Bird-Destroyers, the Gamekeeper and “naturalist”...

[A] “‘Tis nothing but a little downy owl.”— Shelley. A NOTHER bird that visits country-houses with unbounded confidence in man, if man would only recognise it, is the owl. How many people know that if they will put little barrels up in trees, or among ivy, that the barn-owls will accept the invitation and make the barrels their home, bringing to it many a hundred mice in the course of the year, and scaring away thousands more? Yet such is the case. And those who keep pigeons need not be alarmed.

The Sea-Eagle—Guillemots—Egg-Gathering—The Paradise of the Puffins—The Stormy-Petrel—The Sea-Eagle’s Victims—The Black-Backed Gull—The Skua—Among the Cormorants and Gulls...

T HE following lines of Spenser’s, though multitudes have been written upon the eagle, have never been improved upon: “Sailing with supreme dominion, through the azure deep of air”—“Eagles, golden-feathered, who do tower above us in their beauty, and must reign, in right thereof,”—but it is no use to go on quoting, for the poets’ tributes to their flight alone would fill many pages. To feel the full force of them, to understand how little exaggeration there is in them, one must have seen an eagl

The Kingfisher—The Mystery and Folk-Lore of the Halcyon—The Water-Vole at Home—In the Water-Meadows—The Moorhen and its Haunts—The Reed-warbler—The Sedge-Warbler—Music of the Summer Nights—Waking the Sun...

S O writes Michael Drayton in the sixteenth century, and how true an observer of Nature the old poet was is proved by the words of our latest ornithologist: “It alights on some twig bending over the stream, its weight causing it to swing gently to and fro, whence it scans the young trout sporting in the pool below, and suddenly it will drop into the water, and almost before the spectator is aware of the fact, is back again on its perch with a struggling fish in its beak.” Nor must the meaning of