of birds that haunt the waste—which is instantly followed by a swishing of the wings, making quite a music in the air. When at its loudest and harshest, this cry, which then becomes a scream, is quite an extraordinary sound, having a mewing intonation in it suggesting a cat as the performer. Yet it is nothing so extraordinary as some notes of the snipe which I have heard, mostly during the winter, and which are indeed—at least they have struck me as being so—amongst the most wonderful that ever issued from the throat of bird. I will recur to them again when I come to the moor-hen (for it was in his company I heard them), a bird that is itself as a whole orchestra of peculiar brazen instruments. These wild cries and screams blend harmoniously with the curious, monotonous, yet musical bleating, and come finely out of the gloom of the evening thickening into night, as it descends over the wide expanse of the fenlands. Best heard then—and there: the darkening sky, the wide and wind-swept waste of coarse tufted grass, amongst which brown dock-stalks stand tall-ly and thinly, the long, raised bank with its thin belt of reeds beyond, emphasising rather than relieving the flatness, the lonely thorn-bush, the stunted willow or two, the black line of alders marking the course of the sluggish river, the wind, the sad whispered music in the grasses, the wilder music in the air, the aloneness, the drearness—such voices fit such scenes."
The male and female snipe both bleat, but the feathers in the tail which produce the sound are less modified in the female, and the sound which they produce is said to be different in consequence. That there must be a difference would seem to follow of
