With regard to birds, I see them mentally in two ways: each species which I have known and observed in its wild state has its type in the mind--an image which I invariably see when I think of the species; and, in addition, one or two or several, in some cases as many as fifty, images of the same species of bird as it appeared at some exceptionally favourable moment and was viewed with peculiar interest and pleasure.
Of hundreds of such enduring images of our commonest species I will here describe one before concluding with this part of the subject.
The long-tailed or bottle-tit is one of the most delicately pretty of our small woodland birds, and among my treasures, in my invisible and intangible album, there were several pictures of him which I had thought unsurpassable, until on a day two years ago when a new and better one was garnered. I was walking a few miles from Bath by the Avon where it is not more than thirty or forty yards wide, on a cold, windy, very bright day in February. The opposite bank was lined with bushes growing close to the water, the roots and lower trunks of many of them being submerged, as the river was very full; and behind this low growth the ground rose abruptly, forming a long green hill crowned with tall beeches. I stopped to admire one of the bushes across the stream, and I wish I could now say what its species was: it was low with widespread branches close to the surface of the water, and its leafless twigs were adorned with catkins resembling those of the black poplar, as long as a man's little finger, of a rich dark-red or maroon colour. A party of about a dozen long-tailed tits were travelling, or drifting, in their usual desultory way, through the line of bushes towards this point, and in due time they arrived, one by one, at the bush I was watching, and finding it sheltered from the wind they elected to remain at that spot. For a space of fifteen minutes I looked on with delight, rejoicing at the rare chance which had brought that exquisite bird- and plant-scene before me. The long deep-red pendent catkins and the little pale birdlings among them in their grey and rose-coloured plumage, with long graceful tails and minute round, parroty heads; some quietly perched just above the water, others moving about here and there, occasionally suspending themselves back downwards from the slender terminal twigs--the whole mirrored below. That magical effect of water and sunlight gave to the scene a somewhat fairy-like, an almost illusory, character.