On going to this walled-in thicket one evening I observed a vast concourse of sparrows. They were sitting on the bushes in thousands, and more birds in small companies of a dozen or so, and in small flocks of fifty to a hundred, were continually arriving and settling down among the others to add their voices to the extraordinary hubbub they kept up. It was like a starling's winter roosting-place, and the birds must have come from all the homesteads on either side for a good many miles. These birds, I found, roosted in the old pits, and when they had all disappeared from sight and the loud noise of chirruping had died into silence I walked up to one of the pits and stood over it. The birds took alarm and began to issue out, coming up in rushes of several hundreds at a time, rush succeeding rush at intervals of a few seconds while I stood by, but when I retired to some distance the birds would come up in a continuous stream which sometimes looked in the fading light like a column of smoke rising from the ground.
Three months later, when the sparrows were breeding and spending their nights at home, I revisited the spot, and going to the pit with the elder tree growing in it had a fresh look at the old magpie nest. And there was Mag herself, sitting on her pretty eggs under her roof of thorny sticks! After suffering my presence for about two minutes she slipped off and went away without a sound. Wishing her good luck I came away, as I did not want to make her unhappy by too long a visit.
The magpie is extremely common in these parts although there are no trees for them to breed in. You meet with him twenty times a day when out walking. He flies up a distance ahead, rising vertically, and hovers a moment to get a good look at you, then hastens away on rapidly-beating wings and slopes off into the furze bushes, displaying his open graduated tail. He haunts the homestead and is frequently to be seen associating with the poultry; there are no pheasants here and no gamekeepers to shoot him, and, as in Ireland, the people do not like to injure though they do not love him.
If you chance to hear a bird note or phrase that is new to you in this place you may be sure the magpie is its author. Like the jay he is an inventor of new sounds and has a somewhat different language for every part of the country. The loud brisk chatter, his alarm note, which resembles the tremulous bleat of a goat, is always the same; but his ordinary language, used in conversation, when he is with his mate or a small party of friends, is curiously varied and full of surprises. It was one of my amusements in genial days in winter when a confabulation was in progress to steal as near as I could and sit down among the bushes to listen.