On one such occasion, where the furze was very thick and high, I discovered that the bushes all round me teemed with minute, shadowy-looking bird-forms silently hopping and flitting about. They were golden-crested wrens wintering in this treeless place in considerable numbers. Some of the small boys I talked to in this neighbourhood knew the bird as the "Golden Christian Wrennie"--a rather pretty variant.
But the Golden Christian Wrennie is not _the_ wren--not the Cornish wren; for there is a proper Cornish wren, even as there is a St. Kilda wren, and as there is a native wren, or local race or _Troglodytes parvulus_, in every county, in every village and farm-house and wood and coppice and hedge in the United Kingdom. He is a home-keeping little bird, and when you find him, summer or winter, in town or country, you know that he is a native, that his family is a very old one in that part and was probably settled there before the advent of blue-eyed man and the dawn of a Bronze Age.
He is universal, and that gives one the idea that he is very evenly distributed; but I had no sooner set foot in this "westest" part of all England than I found the wren more common than in any other part of the country known to me, and this greatly pleased me because of my love of him. Indeed, it was the prevalence of the wren which made the West Cornwall bird life seem very much to me, despite the fact that the best species have been extirpated or driven away and that no peregrine or chough or hoopoe, or other distinguished feathered stranger, can return to these shores and not be instantly massacred by the sportsmen, ornithologists and private collectors. But the common little wren is admired and respected by every one, even by the philistines. It is not that he seeks to ingratiate himself with us like the robin; he is the very opposite of that friendly little creature, and indeed I like him as much for his independence as for his other sterling qualities. You may feed the birds every day in cold weather and have them gather in crowds to gobble up your scraps, but you will not find the wren among them. He doesn't want of your charity, and can get his own living in all seasons and in all places, rough or smooth, as you will find if you walk round the coast from St. Ives to Land's End or to Mount's Bay.