Preface.
This work originated in the idea that, amongst the thousand-and-one books upon British birds, there might be room for yet another which should treat of their habits and mode of life as influenced by the varying seasons of the year. For each change—of strengthening light, increasing temperature and lengthening days, or the converse in the second half of the year—marks the epoch of some accompanying event in the bird-world so closely associated with it in the mind of the naturalist "who loves to lie i' the sun" that he cannot imagine the one without the other. What would the first genial day in February be without the first soaring skylark, or October's roaring gale without the fieldfares and redwings which drift overhead with the flying leaves?
In Southern France, where an earlier spring than ours treads on the heels of a winter which has passed with scarcely a hint of damp and chill, we are conscious of something wanting. The shower is past, and we listen, for what? On reflection we know what the ear expects—the song of the thrush. Alas, the Frenchman knows him better and appreciates him more in the form of grive rôti than as the full-throated chorister who pipes the onward march of spring. For, spite of bird-catchers, idle hedge-poppers and larks netted by the thousand for the table, birds meet on the whole with a fairer and more sympathetic treatment in this country than they do across the Channel. A
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