Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/93

Rh ivy berries. The blackcap, though no invalid, shuns our stern winters to spend its time in the sunshine of Italy or North Africa; it is an early immigrant, but by no means the first to return; these two were neither early nor late, but were exceptions to the rule that blackcaps emigrate. South Devon had tempted them to stay; there was food in abundance, flies and fruit, in the sheltered rock garden; why risk the perils of a long Channel crossing? A couple were they? No, a pair; male with black cap, female with brown; they were a constant pair too, electing to share the experiment of wintering in England in one another's company. In early April the cock blackcaps arrive in our woods, producing song little inferior to that of the boasted nightingale; they spy out the land and select territory, awaiting the arrival, some days later, of the hens. But what happens in normal winter quarters? In Italy and Africa do the sexes remain together, and when the time comes for a northward move does the male bird take leave, explaining that he is going to survey the land? Here, in England, the two were together, and when one flew the other followed; they were undoubtedly mated birds.

Blackcaps were not the only winterers on this South Devon coast. In that peaceful hamlet, one of the most beautiful spots on a beautiful shore, which shares with the busy Lancashire watering-place the name of Blackpool, the chiffchaff was working the blighted bark of the apple-trees in an ancient orchard. Woolly aphids, tiny morsels even for a tiny bird, supplied the warbler with sweetness and sustenance; it was too busy to sing as it flitted from stem to branch, and branch to stem, pecking, pecking, pecking, wherever it went.

In the mild West Country chiffchaff and blackcap, landrail and, it is said, swallow, vary their normal habits by risking an occasional winter, and more rarely still the