THE BIRDS OF THE MONTHS--SOME RARE BIRDS AND SOME COMMON--JANUARY AND THE FIELDFARE--FEBRUARY AND THE ROOK--MARCH, APRIL, MAY, WITH THE THRUSH, SWALLOW AND NIGHTINGALE--THE TERRORS OF MIGRATION--JUNE AND THE RING-DOVE--A WOOD-PIGEON PROBLEM--THE DOTTEREL--EVENING VOICES: THE NIGHT-JARS--JULY AND THE SKYLARK--AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, WITH GROUSE AND PARTRIDGE--THE PTARMIGAN--THE OLD COCK-PHEASANT--NOVEMBER AND THE WOODCOCK--DECEMBER WITH ITS ROBIN AND WREN [Illustration] CHAPTER II "_Kirchup! Kirchup! among the wheats_ _Partridge distant partridge greets,_ _Beckoning hints to those that roam_ _That guide the squandered cover home._" CLARE. It is easy, taking a score of birds, to construct a bird-calendar, a zodiac of birds, that comes very near the actual truths, and almost exhausts the list of more notable land-fowl. There are some, like the heron or the bittern, the curlew, the woodpecker, or the coot, that are not significant of any particular time and season, because they are not sufficiently familiar. It is only by some fortunate accident and in particular places that you may hear the lonely cry of "the heron as he spreads his wing, By twilight o'er a haunted spring;" or the bittern "bellowing harsh, To its dark bottom shake the shuddering marsh." It is a very quaint and ancient myth that the "mire-dromble" or "mere-drum" fixed its beak in a hollow reed or in the bog, and by "snoring," "booming," or "bellowing" through it made, as Burns says, "the quagmire reel." Several poets refer to the bittern "shaking the solid ground," Thomson among them, in the absurd lines, "The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht, to shake the surrounding marsh." But they are all to be traced back to Michael Drayton's description of how "The buzzing bitter sits, while through his hollow bill A sudden bellowing sounds, which many times doth fill The neighbouring marsh with noise, as though a bull did roar." It is altogether a delightful bird in poetry and folk-lore, this "bog-bumper" or "betowre," or whatever name we choose to know it by. The curlew again, a bird of the coast and the northern uplands, is familiar only to those who live near marsh and moor, though its weird, wild clamour, as it passes overhead in the night, is the source of a superstition, which, as "Gabriel's hounds," "The Seven Whistlers," "The Wild Huntsman," is common to all Northern Europe, and is probably the origin of that fearful wild-fowl that was the "trump of doleful drere," "the whistler shrill that whoso hears doth die," to which Wordsworth alludes: "He the seven birds hath seen that never part, Seen the seven whistlers in their nightly rounds, And counted them;" and Moore: "Oh! did you hear a voice of death? And did you not mark a paly form, Which rode on the silver mist of the heath, And sang a ghostly dirge in the storm?"