Summer, winter and spring, it was an unfailing pleasure in Patagonia to listen to the singing of the birds. They were most abundant where the cultivated valley with its groves and orchards was narrowest, and the thorny wilderness of the upland close at hand; just as in England small birds abound most where plantations of fruit trees exist side by side with or near to extensive woods and commons. In the first there is an unfailing supply of insect food, the second affords them the wild cover they prefer, and they pass frequently from one to the other. At a distance from the river birds were not nearly so abundant, and in the higher uplands a hundred miles from the coast they were very scarce.

When the idle fit was on me it was my custom to ramble in the bushy lands away from the river, especially during the warm spring weather, when there were some fresh voices to be heard of migrants newly arrived from the tropics, and the songs of the resident species had acquired a greater vigour and beauty. It was a pleasure simply to wander on and on for hours, moving cautiously among the bushes, pausing at intervals to listen to some new note; or to hide myself and sit or lie motionless in the middle of a thicket, until the birds forgot or ceased to be troubled at my presence. The common resident mocking-bird was always present, each bird sitting motionless on the topmost spray of his favourite thorn, at intervals emitting a few notes, a phrase, then listening to the others.

But there was one bitter drop in my sweet cup. It vexed my mind and made me almost unhappy to think that travellers and naturalists from Europe, whose works were known to me, were either silent or else said very little (and that mostly depreciatory) of the bird music that was so much to me. Darwin’s few words were especially remembered and rankled most in my mind, because he was the greatest and had given a good deal of attention to bird life in southern South America. The highest praise that he gave to a Patagonian songster was that it had “two or three pleasant notes”; and of the Calandria mocking-bird, one of the finest melodists in La Plata, he wrote that it was nearly the only bird he had seen in South America that regularly took its stand for the purpose of singing; that it was remarkable for possessing a song superior to that of any other kind, and THAT ITS SONG RESEMBLED THAT OF THE SEDGE WARBLER!

Speaking of British species, I do not think it could be rightly said that the song of the sedge warbler resembles that of the song-thrush. I do think that the thrush’s song often resembles that of the mocking-bird referred to, also that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that all the music of the song-thrush might be taken out of the Calandria mocking-bird’s performance and not be very greatly missed.

The desire to say something on this subject was strong in me at that time, for, leaving aside the larger question of the bird music of South America, I could not help thinking that these observers had missed the chief excellence of the songsters known to me. But I had no title to speak; I had not heard the nightingale, song-thrush, blackbird, skylark, and all the other members of that famous choir whose melody has been a delight to our race for so many ages; I was without the standard which others had, and being without it, could not be absolutely sure that a mistake had been made, and that the opinion I had formed of the melodists of my own district was not too high. Now that I am familiar with the music of British song-birds in a state of nature the case is different, and I can express myself on the subject without fear and without doubt. But I have no intention of speaking in this place of the South American bird music I know, comparing it with that of England. And this for two reasons. One is that I have already written on this subject in ‘Argentine Ornithology’ and ‘The Naturalist in La Plata’. The second reason is because bird music, and, indeed, bird sounds generally, are seldom describable. We have no symbols to represent such sounds on paper, hence we are as powerless to convey to another the impression they make on us as we are to describe the odours of flowers. It is hard, perhaps, to convince ourselves of this powerlessness; in my case the saddening knowledge was forced on me in such a way that escape was impossible. No person at a distance from England could have striven harder than I did, by inquiring of those who knew and by reading ornithological works, to get a just idea of the songs of British birds. Yet all my pains were wasted, as I found out afterwards when I heard them, and when almost every song came to me as a surprise. It could not have been otherwise. To name only half a dozen of the lesser British melodists: the little jets of brilliant melody spurted out by the robin; the more sustained lyric of the wren, sharp, yet delicate: the careless half-song, half-recitative of the common warbler; the small fragments of dreamy aerial music emitted by the wood wren amidst the high translucent foliage; the hurried, fantastic medley of liquid and grating sounds of the reed warbler; the song, called by some a twitter, of the swallow, in which the quick, upleaping notes seem to dance in the air, to fall more than one at a time on the sense, as if more than one bird sang, spontaneous and glad as the laughter of some fairy-like, unimaginable child — who can give any idea of such sounds as these with such symbols as words! It is easy to say that a song is long or short, varied or monotonous, that a note is sweet, clear, mellow, strong, weak, loud, shrill, sharp, and so on; but from all this we get no idea of the distinctive character of the sound, since these words describe only class, or generic qualities, not the specific and individual. It sometimes seems to help us, in describing a song, to give its feeling, when it strikes us as possessing some human feeling, and call it joyous, glad, plaintive, tender, and so on; but this is, after all, a rough expedient, and, often as not misleads. Thus, in the case of the nightingale, I had been led by reading to expect to hear a distinctly plaintive song, and found it so far from plaintive that I was swayed to the opposite extreme, and pronounced it (with Coleridge) a glad song. But by-and-by I dismissed this notion as equally false with the other; the more I listened the more I admired the purity of sound in some notes, the exquisite phrasing, the beautiful contrasts; the art was perfect, but there was no passion in it all — no HUMAN feeling. Feeling of some unhuman kind there perhaps was, but not gladness, such as we imagine in the skylark’s song, and certainly not sorrow, nor anything sad. Again, when we listen to a song that all have agreed to call “tender,” we perhaps recognise some quality that faintly resembles, or affects us like, the quality of tenderness in human speech or vocal music; but if we think for a moment, we are convinced that it is not tenderness, that the effect is not quite the same; that we have so described it only because we have no suitable word; that there is really no suggestion of human feeling in it.

The old method of SPELLING bird notes and sounds still finds favour with some easy-going naturalists, and it is possible that those who use it do actually believe that the printed word represents some avian sound to the reader, and that those who have never heard the sound can by this simple means get an idea of it; just as certain arbitrary marks or signs on a sheet of written music represent human sounds. It is fancy and a delusion. We have not yet invented any system of arbitrary signs to represent bird sounds, nor are we likely to invent such a system, because, in the first place, we do not properly know the sounds, and, owing to their number and character, cannot properly know more than a very few of them; and, in the second place, because they are different in each species: and just as our human notation represents solely our human specific sounds, so a notation of one bird’s language, that of the skylark, let us say, would not apply to the language of another species, the nightingale, say, on account of the difference in quality and timbre of the two.

One cause of the extreme difficulty of describing bird sounds so as to give anything approaching to a correct idea of them, lies in the fact that in most of them, from the loudest — the clanging scream or call that may be heard a distance of two or three miles — to the faintest tinkling or lisping note that might be emitted by a creature no bigger than a fly, there is a certain aerial quality which makes them differ from all other sounds. Doubtless several causes contribute to give them this character. There is the great development of the vocal organ, which makes the voice, albeit finer, more far-reaching than that of other creatures of equal size or larger. The body in birds is less solid; it is filled with air in the bones and feathers, and acts differently as a sounding board; furthermore, the extremely distensible esophagus, although it has no connection with the trachea, is puffed out with swallowed air when the bird emits its notes, and this air, both when retained and when released, in some way affects the voice. Then, again, the bird sings or calls, as a rule, from a greater elevation, and does not sit squat, like a toad, on his perch, but being lifted above it on his slender legs, the sounds he emits acquire a greater resonance.

There are bird sounds which may be, and often are, likened to other sounds; to bells, to the clanging produced by blows on an anvil, and to various other metallic noises; and to strokes on tightly-drawn metal strings; also to the more or less musical sounds we are able to draw from wood and bone, and from vessels of glass by striking them or drawing the moistened finger-tips along their rims. There are also sounds resembling those that are uttered by mammalians, as bellowings, lowings, bleatings, neighings, barkings, and yelpings. Others simulate the sounds of various musical instruments, and human vocal sounds, as of talking, humming a tune, whistling, laughing, moaning, sneezing, coughing, and so on. But in all these, or in a very large majority, there is an airy resonant quality which tells you, even in a deep wood, in the midst of an unfamiliar fauna, that the new and strange sound is uttered by a bird. The clanging anvil is in the clouds; the tinkling bell is somewhere in the air, suspended on nothing; the invisible human creatures that whistle, and hum airs, and whisper to one another, and clap their hands and laugh, are not bound, like ourselves, to earth, but float hither and thither as they list.

Something of this serial character is acquired by other sounds, even by the most terrestrial, when heard at a distance in a quiet atmosphere. And some of our finer sounds, as those of the flute and bugle and flageolet, and some others, when heard faintly in the open air, have the airy character of bird notes; with this difference, that they are dim and indistinct to the sense, while the bird’s note, although so airy, is of all sounds the most distinct.

Mr. John Burroughs, in his excellent ‘Impressions of some British Song Birds’, has said, that many of the American songsters are shy wood-birds, seldom seen or heard near the habitations of man, while nearly all the British birds are semi-domesticated, and sing in gardens and orchards; that this fact, in connection with their more soft and plaintive voices, made American song birds seem less to the European traveller than his own. This statement would hold good, and even gain in force, if for North America we should substitute the hot or larger part of South America, or of the Neotropical region, which comprises the whole of America sounth of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Throughout the tropical and sub-tropical portions of this region, which is vastly richer inspecies than the northern half of the continent, the songsters certainly do not, like those of Europe, mass themselves about the habitations of men, as if sweet voices were given to them solely for the delectation of human listeners: they are preeminently birds of the wild forest, marsh, and savannah, and if one of their chief merits has been overlooked, it is because the European naturalist and collector, whose object is to obtain many specimens, and some new forms, has no time to make himself acquainted with the life habi............