The best singer among the British buntings, he is also to my mind the prettiest bird. When he is described as black and brown, and lemon and sulphur-yellow, and olive and lavender-grey, and chestnut-red, we are apt to think that the effect of so many colours thrown upon his small body cannot be very { 252} pleasing. But it is not so; these various colours are so harmoniously disposed, and have, in the lighter and brighter hues in the living bird, such a flower-like freshness and delicacy, that the effect is really charming.
When, in June, I first visited the cottage, my host took me into his dressing-room, and from it we watched a pair of cirl buntings bring food to their young in a nest in a small cypress standing just five yards from the window. The young birds were in the pinfeather stage, but they were unfortunately taken a very few days later by a rat, or stoat, or by that winged nest-robber the jackdaw, whose small cunning grey eyes are able to see into so many hidden things.
The birds themselves did not grieve overlong at their loss: the day after the nest was robbed the cock was heard singing--and he continued to sing every day from his favourite tree, an old black poplar growing outside the sweetbriar hedge in front of the cottage.
About this bird of a brave and cheerful disposition, more will have to be said in the next chapter. It is, or was, my desire to describe events in the valley at this changeful period from late July to October in the order of their occurrence, but in all the rest of the present chapter, which will be given to the river birds exclusively, the order must be broken.
Undoubtedly the three commonest water-birds inhabiting inland waters throughout England are { 253} the coot, moor-hen, and dabchick, or little grebe; and on account of their abundance and general distribution they are almost as familiar as our domestic birds. Yet one never grows tired of seeing and hearing them, as we do of noting the actions of other species that inhabit the same places; and the reason for this--a very odd reason it seems!--is because these three common birds, members of two orders which the modern scientific zoologist has set down among the lowest, and therefore, as he tells us, most stupid, of the feathered inhabitants of the globe, do actually exhibit a quicker intelligence and greater variety in their actions and habits than the species which are accounted their superiors.