Birds and Man

Years ago, in a chapter concerning eyes in a book of Patagonian memories, I spoke of the unpleasant sensations produced in me by the sight of stuffed birds. Not bird skins in th...

The most interesting chapter in John Burroughs' Fresh Fields contains an account of an anxious hurried search after a nightingale in song, at a time of the year when that "creat...

When my mind was occupied with the subject of the last chapter--the human quality in some sweet bird voices--it struck me forcibly that all resemblances to man in the animal and...

First impressions of faces are very much to us; vivid and persistent, even long after they have been judged false they will from time to time return to console or mock us. It is...

One November evening, in the neighbourhood of Lyndhurst, I saw a flock of geese marching in a long procession, led, as their custom is, by a majestical gander; they were coming...

When the spring-feeling is in the blood, infecting us with vague longings for we know not what; when we are restless and seem to be waiting for some obstruction to be removed--b...

Daws are more abundant in the west and south-west of England generally than in any other part of the kingdom; and they abound most in Somerset, or so it has seemed to me. It is...

To most of our wild birds man must appear as a being eccentric and contradictory in his actions. By turns he is hostile, indifferent, friendly towards them, so that they never q...

I am not an admirer of pet parrots. To me, and I have made the discovery that to many others too, it is a depressing experience, on a first visit to nice people, to find that a...

East of Wells Cathedral, close to the moat surrounding the bishop's palace, there is a beautifully wooded spot, a steep slope, where the birds had their headquarters. There was...

The willow wren is one of the commonest and undoubtedly the most generally diffused of the British songsters. A summer visitor, one of the earliest to arrive, usually appearing...

In November, when tramping in the Midlands, I paid a visit to a friend who had previously informed me, in describing the attractions of the small, remote, rustic village he live...

Mr Warde Fowler in his Summer Studies of Birds and Books has a pleasant chapter on wagtails, in which he remarks incidentally that he does not care for the big solemn birds that...

It was said by a Norfolk naturalist more than three-quarters of a century ago, that the desire to possess "something pretty in a glass case" caused the killing of very many bird...

At the head of the Cheddar valley, a couple of miles from the cathedral city of Wells, the Somerset Axe is born, gushing out noisily, a mighty volume of clear cold water, from a...