The Lark, then, so often apostrophised as the first voice of Spring, is by no means specifically the Herald of March. When we see his brown body breasting the air-waves of the March wind, it may not be the welcome migrant from the South we see, with greenness in his high aerial note and the smell of hay and wild roses in the o’ercome of his song, but a winter-exile from a far mountain-vale in Scandinavia or from the snowbound wastes of Courland or Westphalia. The Woodlark, the Chiff-Chaff, and the rest, all are heralds of March. But as we identify certain birds with certain seasons and certain qualities ... as the Swallow with April, and the Cuckoo with May, and the Dove with peace ... so we have come to think of the Mavis and the Merle, but, above all, of the Skylark as the true heralds of March, the month when the Flutes of Pan sound from land’s end to land’s end, for all that tempest and flood, sleet and the polar blast and the bitter wind of the east, may ravage the coverts of the winged clans. To write of all the birds who come back to us in the Spring, even so early as the front of March, would be, here, a mere catalogue, and then be incomplete. For the hidden places in the woods, in the meadows, in the hedgerows, on the moors, in the sandy dunes, in the hollowed rocks, on the ledges over green water and on the wind-scooped foreheads of cliffs and precipices; everywhere, from the heather-wilderness on the unsnowed hills to the tangled bent on the little windswept eyot set in the swing of the tides, the secret homes are waiting, or are already filled, and glad with that everlasting and unchanging business of the weaving anew of life which has the constancy of sunrise, the rhythmic certitude of day and night. The spiritual secret of our delight in the joyousness of the lark’s song, or in that of mavis or merle, is because the swift music is a rapture transcending human utterance. There is not less joy in the screech of the jay, in the hoarse cry of the cormorant, in the scream of the gannet poised like a snowflake two thousand feet above the turbulent surge of blue and white, or green and grey, to its vision but a vast obscurity of calm filled with phantom life, a calm moveless seen from that great height, wrinkled only with perplexing interplay of wave and shadow. These have their joy, and to the open ear _are_ joy; not less than the merle singing among wet lilac, the mavis calling from the swaying poplar, the lark flinging the largesse of his golden music along the high devious azure roads. Can one doubt that this is so ... that, listening with the inward ear, we must hold as dear the wail of the curlew, the mournful cry of the lapwing, when on the hill-slope or in the wild grass these call rejoicingly in life and love and the mute ecstasy of implicit duty.