From fox's earth to mountain tarn; days among the wild animals of Scotland

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 Excerpt: ...area, that the grass grew long for shelter and the nettles for protection. By the time he comes, plant life is on the rush, the growth is bewildering, and the nester is at fault. The mate dances half mockingly. Half in spite the boy calls him a "bletherer." Several nests are in the lane; two deep in the bramble cushion behind a chevaux de /rise of prickles; one in the long grass. None of the characteristic birds of English lanes are there. One scarcely misses them. One wants everything to be itself. It is among those negative characters which make a Scots lane. If one were to come, it would be like having a singing bird in a house. Or as though one's mother were suddenly to talk English, when her homely doric was part of herself, and woven in with our earliest recollections. All the poetry would be gone. The man who sought to introduce the nightingale to the north made an experiment doubtful in taste and futile in result. He put the eggs in the nest of a northern bird. He wished to enrich Scots lanes with the "joug joug," the glorious crescendo. Say he did it here; put them under a hedge-warbler. The young birds would imitate the hedge-warbler's lay and never sing the nightingale's song. As the foster-parents would not migrate, the brood would stay along with them and perish. Were the eggs put in the whitethroat's nest, the young would imitate the comic ditty, instead of singing its own tragic lay. It might migrate then, as a nightingale, with the song of a whitethroat. Enough that there are no nightingales nor other English warblers in the Scots lanes. The remoteness of this no-man's-land, between highway and highway, is the atmosphere of nomad life. Tramps swarm--from the aristocracy with van and horse, through the philistines with car...