There is a good deal of rough weather but little frost in this district; behind the cliffs, sheltered by stone hedges and thickets of furze, the green field is the chief feeding-ground of the birds; there with the rooks and daws and gulls and peewits you find fieldfares--the bluebird of the natives--and missel-thrushes in flocks, and the greybird, as the song-thrush is called, the blackbird and small troops of wintering larks. Most abundant is the starling, a winter visitor too, for he does not breed in this part of Cornwall. You will find a flock in every little field, and the sight of your head above the stone wall sends them off with a rush, emitting the low guttural alarm note which sounds like running water.
The yellowhammer is a common resident species here. We usually think him an uninteresting bird on account of his phlegmatic disposition and monotonous song, but in this district, in winter, I found him curiously attractive, and among the modestly-coloured birds that were his neighbours he was certainly the most splendid. That may appear a word better suited to the golden oriole, but I am thinking of one of his aspects, as I frequently saw him, and of a miracle of the sun. Here, in winter, he congregates in small companies or flocks at the farms, and at one small farm where there was a rather better shelter than at most of the others, owing to the way the houses and outhouses and ricks were grouped together, the company of wintering yellowhammers numbered about eighty or ninety. Every evening, when there was any sun, these birds would gather on some spot--a rick or barn roof or on the dark green bushes--sheltered from the sea wind, where they could catch the last rays. Sitting motionless grouped together in such numbers they made a strangely pretty picture.
One evening, at another farm-house, I was standing out of doors talking with the farmer, when the sun came out beneath a bank of dark cloud and shone level on the slate roof of a cow-house near us. It was an old roof on which the oxidised slate had taken a soft blue-grey or dove colour--the one beautiful colour ever seen in weathered slate; and no sooner had the light fallen on it than a number of yellow-hammers flew from some other point where they had been sitting and dropped down upon this roof. They were scattered over the slates, and, sitting motionless with heads drawn in and plumage bunched out, they were like golden images of birds, as if the sun had poured a golden-coloured light into their loose feathers to make them shine.