Birds in Town & Village

At the beginning of December I had to move to a nursing-home at the Convent of the Sisters of the Cross at the adjacent village of Hayle, just across the estuary. The Convent bu...

After the middle of June the common began to attract me more and more. It was so extensive that, standing on its border, just beyond the last straggling cottages and orchards, t...

For a time I feared that I was to be just as unlucky with regard to the jay, seeing that the owner of the extensive beech woods adjoining the village permitted his keeper to kil...

and can imagine him--the poet himself--coming to see me through the woods and down the hill with the careless ease and lightness of heart of his own purple-winged child of earth...

But for the poor starling there is little joy in these brief, dark, wet winter days, even if there is little frost in this West Cornwall climate. A frost of a few days' duration...

It is melancholy to think that this quaint and beautiful bird of a unique type has been growing less and less common in our country during the last half a century, or for a long...

This book is more than a mere reprint of _Birds in a Village_ first published in 1893. That was my first book about bird life, with some impressions of rural scenes, in England;...

A few words on the latest attempt which has been made to naturalize an exotic bird in England will not seem out of place here. About eight years ago a gentleman in Essex introdu...

So many did I open that I at last grew tired of the process, like a man to whom the post has brought too many letters; but there was one--the last I opened--the living active co...

A striking instance of this tameness and stupidly acquiescent spirit in people generally was witnessed during the intensely severe frosts of the early part of the late winter (1...

The effect of the contrast was grand. He shook himself again, and lifted and dropped his arms again, assuming, for the nonce, the peculiar aquiline slouch; and there before us s...

That these large kinds thrive so well with us is an encouraging fact; but the question that concerns us at present is the feasibility of importing birds of the grove, chiefly of...

Just out of hearing of the grasshopper warblers, there was a good-sized pool of water on the common, probably an old gravel-pit, its bottom now overgrown with rushes. A sedge wa...

After my long talk with the bird-catcher on June 24, and two more talks equally long on the two following days, I found that something of the charm the common had had for me was...

Someone has said that every line in that incomparable poem brings at least one distinct picture vividly before the mind's eye. The picture the first line of the couplet I have q...

Undoubtedly the chough comes nearest to the daw mentally, and as it is a far more beautiful bird--the poor daw having little of that quality--it would probably have been our pri...