LITTLE BIRDS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16627, 25 August 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

LITTLE BIRDS.

°P IN THE MOUNTAINSBY FRANK MOBTCN. I don't know how it originated, the phrase "a little bird told me," but I think I can hazard a guess. The little birds m their native haunts are the friendliest ot living creatures, instinctive coquettes, and most inveterate gossips. There are the entails of New Zealand; I think that . " the name, but it really does not matter They are the cosiest customers, these fantads, and the showiest of their size that Nature can produce. - They are, of course, many small birds with lovelier plumage, but they have a handicap of modesty or shyness, and are seldom easily seen. Now the fantail is showy of her nature. She has a thousand dainty tricks of gesture, each one with its characteristic revealing grace. She takes you into her confidence just as far as she wants to, and then flits away and leaves you guessing. She has no fear, but she has developed enlightened caution into the finest of the arts. Australian Birds. When I first came to know the fantail at Mahurangi Heads one summer, I decided that she was the most alluring of all the little birds. Here in Australia I have begun to entertain doubts. Australia has a legion of tiny songsters', each delicious. Down by the sea at Manly, where I live, there are the wagtails. They come and go. They are in such numbers that I suppose it is a rare thing for a fellow to see the same girl twice. And they have remarkably much in common with the fantail over the water. They are, somehow, quite in the family. A humming-bird I never personally met, but men who have been out in the sort of pestiferous places that hummingbirds choose to reside in tell me that the humming-bird is all beauty and no soul. "I think," said a man to me the other day, a man who knew all about these odd places, " I think the humming-bird is the silliest of the feathered tribe." So I'm not ; anxious for an introduction, being a natural hater of most silly things— perhaps of all silly things except the silly dear thing called Woman. But up here on the Blue Mountains I have lately met a lot of little birdß with perfectly delightful qualities. There is one advantage about being a vagrom journalist —the only one: A person can play ducks and drakes with all those regular rules of life that do so strangely appeal to other persona guaranteed respectable. One has not to get to an office at a certain fixed hour daily; one has, indeed, seldom a fixed office. A man kn->ws a certain number of charming people who pay him decent moneys for various stuff he writes. By long practice he has acquired a queer dexterity,, so that he never sends a sonnet on privateering dimples to the editor of a Presbyterian magazine or a serious article on freewill and determinism to the conductor of a sporting print. But all his customers treat him with extraordinary consideration. That is why up here in the Blue .mountains, though there is a tradition that I am frightfully overworked, I go in some days by this'train and some days by that, and some, days not at all. If I were examined under oath, I should have to say that newspaper proprietors are the only true philanthropists; though at this time I would not have them guess it for the world. So I have plenty of time in which to loaf about the gullies and to go clambering over the ridges, and always the host of little birds keeps me enticing company. A New Little Bird. I met one bird to-day. My daughter and I had climbed down precipices and crushed through deep beds of bosky bracken, and in the end had come upon a tiny rill that lisped along a deep bed at the bottom. And here I found a new little bird that is, I think, the sweetest of them all. I don't know her name, and I don't want to, because names are so often disillusioning; I once knew a truly wonderful girl named Bloggs. The new bird is about the size of an average tit. Her plumage is striking without being m the least gaudy. She is demure but brisk, if you can understand me; the adornment of a bayadere with the manners of a gentlewoman. At a short distance she always looks as if she is carrying something that glistens in her beak, but when you see her close you note that the beak itself is a glistening flexible delicacy two inches long. The beak of this little bird is one of the most exquisite things in Nature. It ie ineffably fine and slender, and against the light it shows diaphanous. But I have no doubt that it serves perfectly the purpose for which the good God designed it. With such a beak our friend could feed through the eye of a needle. She twitters through it very, beautifully, the.tiniest clear trickle of silvern song imaginable. And her discriminating confidence is as tender as it is proud. Understanding Sympathy. She came up as I sat at the base of a tree-fern mopping my brow, and sitting on a nearby branch she gazed at me ihen she said something incoherent that was somehow quite encouraging. After that she made a dazzling circle in the air within three feet of my nose. In one shimmering square foot of bracing air she looped the loop seven times, and everv loop was a perfect curve. Then her mate appeared a shade sedater, but no less selfpossessed I wondered audibly whether she bad had the same mate a year aao and the flitter of her tail said, as plainly as words could speak, " You should not let your suspicious wonders rove; suffice it that for this season, or at this minute ? Tu? V ? r L olute monogamist." I doubt whether I could have understood her better or loved her more had I been one of those erudite sad coves who go about betraying a gross familiarity with nature and sticking angular Latin names on things. She was blithe and gay, I was grateful and sympathetic, the sun shone clear through a wonderful coy warmth of green, and God was in His Heaven; what mattered anything else. I don t know much about ornithology, but I know in Whom I have believed, and that solace is one that I and the little birds have in common. I dare say that your Latinist with spectacles would have called the little bird something pbhnsonia. ! I knew her for God's daughter and a sister of mine, and that was enough for me. And my young daughter said it was enough for her, too. It's a good world.