Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/57

Rh the lengthening days. On all hands they are tinkering at kettles, and tiny anvils ring under their sounding strokes. The loudest performer is naturally the Great Tit, whose note is said to resemble the sound produced by sharpening a saw with a file, an operation to which, it must be confessed, chance has never given us the opportunity of listening. The Coal Tit reiterates his "sista-wéet, sista-wéet"; a like spring-fever seizes the Blue Tit, and amongst the pollard willows by the weir the Marsh Tit is taking his turn as a variety artiste. For an individual tit of any one of these four species will invent some fresh variation and practise it all day long, to forget it completely next morning and hark back to its more familiar note. So much is this the case that anything novel in call-notes incessantly repeated, and especially if having about it the resonance of hammered metal, seldom puzzles us, being at once attributed to the versatile genius of a tit, either large or small. It is true that we have been deceived once or twice into imagining that the chiff-chaff, or the tree pipit had arrived before its time, till a sight of the author proved that it was merely a tit favouring his woodland audience with the latest addition to his repertoire. Thus, many as are the tunes and impossible as it is to remember them in detail, they may usually be recognized by their family likeness and taken together they form a tinkling accompaniment to the minstrelsy of the still leafless woods.