I had thought to write more, a whole chapter in fact, on this fascinating and puzzling insect--our "noble ant," as our old ant-lover Gould called it; but I have had to throw out that and much besides in order to keep this book within reasonable dimensions.
There is another noise of birds in all woods and copses in the silent season which is familiar to { 94} everyone--the sudden excited cries they utter at the sight of some prowling animal--fox, cat, or stoat. Even in the darkest, stillest woods these little tempests of noise occasionally break out, for no sooner does one bird utter the alarm cry than all within hearing hasten to the spot to increase the tumult. These tempests are of two kinds--the greater and lesser; in the first jays, blackbirds, and missel-thrushes take part, the magpie too, if he is in the wood, and almost invariably the outcry is caused by the appearance of one of the animals just named. In the smaller outbreaks, which are far more frequent, none of these birds take any part, not even the excitable blackbird, in spite of his readiness to make a noise on the least provocation. Only the smaller birds are concerned here, from the chaffinch down; and the weasel is, I believe, almost always the exciting cause. If it be as I think, a curious thing is that birds like the chaffinch and the tits, which have their nests placed out of its reach, should be so overcome at the sight of this minute creature which hunts on the ground, and which blackbirds and jays refuse to notice in spite of the outrageous din of the finches. The chaffinch is invariably first and loudest in these outbreaks; a dozen or twenty times a day, even in July and August, you will hear his loud passionate _pink-pink_ calling on all of his kind to join him, and by-and-by, if you can succeed in getting to the spot, you will hear other species joining in--the girding of oxeye and blue tit, the angry, percussive note of the wren, the low wailing of the robin, and { 95} the still sadder dunnock, and the small plaintive cries of the tree-warblers.
What an idle demonstration, what a fuss about nothing it seems! The minute weasel is on the track of a vole or a wood-mouse and cannot harm the birds. Yes, he can take the nestlings from the robin's and willow-wren's nests, and from other nests built on the ground, but what has the chaffinch to do with it all? Can it be that there is some fatal weakness in birds, in spite of their wings, in this bird especially, such as exists in voles, and mice, and rabbits, and in frogs and lizards, which brings them down to destruction, and of which they are in some way conscious? Some months ago there was a correspondence in the _Field_ which touched upon this very subject. One gentleman wrote that he had found three freshly-killed adult cock chaffinches in a weasel's nest, and he asked in consequence how this small creature that hunts on the ground could be so successful in capturing so alert and vigorous a bird as this finch.