rning and all the morning long. In the copse the ring of the
two notes is a little toned down and lost by passing through the
boughs, which hold and check the vibration of the sound. One year a
detached ash in Cooper's Field, not fifty yards from the houses, was
a favourite resort, and while perched there the notes echoed along
the buildings, one following the other as waves roll on the summer
sands. Flying from the ash to the copse, or along the copse hedge,
the cuckoo that year was as often seen as the sparrows, and as
little notice was taken of him. Several times cuckoos have flown
over this house, but just clearing the roof, and descending directly
they were over to the copse. He has not called so much this year
yet, but on the evening of May 8 he was crying in the copse at
half-past eight while the moon was shining.

On the morning of May 2, standing in the garden, or at the window of
any of the rooms facing south, you could hear five birds calling
together. The cuckoo was calling not far from the tallest birch;
there was a turtle-dove cooing in the copse much closer; and a
wood-pigeon overpowered the dove's soft voice every two or three
minutes--the pigeon was not fifty yards distant; a wryneck was
perched up in an oak at the end of the garden, and uttered his
peculiar note from time to time, and a nightingale was singing on
Tolworth Common, just opposite the house, though on the other side.
These were all audible, sometimes together, sometimes alternately;
and if you went to the northern windows or the front door, looking
towards the common, then you might also hear the chatter of a
brook-sparrow. The dove has a way of gurgling his coo in the throat.
The wryneck's 'kie-kie-kie,' the last syllable plaintively
prolonged, is not like the call or songs of other birds; it reminds
one of the peacock's strange scream, not in its actual sound, but
its singularity. When it is suddenly heard from the midst of the
thick green hedges of a summer's day, the bird itself unseen, it has
a weird sound, which does not accord, like the blackbird's whistle,
with our trees; it seems as if some tropical bird had wandered
hither. I have heard the wryneck calling in the oak at the end of
the garden every morning this season before rising, and suspect,
from his constant presence, that a nest will be built close by. Last
year the wryneck was a scarce bird in this neighbourhood; in all my
walks I heard but two or three, and at long interv