Nevertheless, there was another still to come, the one I perhaps love best of all. On the last day of April I heard the song of the wood wren, and at once all the other notes ceased for a while to interest me. Even the last comer, the mellow blackcap, might have been singing at that spot since February, like the wren and hedge-sparrow, so familiar and workaday a strain did it seem to have compared with this late warbler. I was more than glad to welcome him to that particular spot, where if he chose to stay I should have him so near me.
It is well known that the wood wren can only be properly seen immediately after his arrival in this country, at the end of April or early in May, when the young foliage does not so completely hide his slight unresting form, as is the case afterwards. For he, too, is green in colour; like Wordsworth's green linnet,
There is another reason why he can be seen so much better during the first days of his sojourn with us: he does not then keep to the higher parts of the tall trees he frequents, as his habit is later, when the air is warm and the minute winged insects on which he feeds are abundant on the upper sun-touched foliage of the high oaks and beeches. On account of that ambitious habit of the wood wren there is no bird with us so difficult to observe; you may spend hours at a spot, where his voice sounds from the trees at intervals of half a minute to a minute, without once getting a glimpse of his form. At the end of April the trees are still very thinly clad; the upper foliage is but an airy garment, a slight golden-green mist, through which the sun shines, lighting up the dim interior, and making the bed of old fallen beech-leaves look like a floor of red gold. The small-winged insects, sun-loving and sensitive to cold, then hold their revels near the surface; and the bird, too, prefers the neighbourhood of the earth. It was so in the case of the wood wren I observed at Wells, watching him on several consecutive days, sometimes for an hour or two at a stretch, and generally more than once a day. The spot where he was always to be found was quite free from underwood, and the trees were straight and tall, most of them with slender, smooth boles. Standing there, my figure must have looked very conspicuous to all the small birds in the place; but for a time it seemed to me that the wood wren paid not the slightest attention to my presence; that as he wandered hither and thither in sunlight and shade at his own sweet will, my motionless form was no more to him than a moss-grown stump or grey upright stone. By and by it became apparent that the bird knew me to be no stump or stone, but a strange living creature whose appearance greatly interested him; for invariably, soon after I had taken up my position, his careless little flights from twig to twig and from tree to tree brought him nearer, and then nearer, and finally near me he would remain for most of the time. Sometimes he would wander for a distance of forty or fifty yards away, but before long he would wander back and be with me once more, often perching so near that the most delicate shadings of his plumage were as distinctly seen as if I had had him perched on my hand.