cottage door which stood open all day. Having delivered the grub, the
starling came out again and, hopping on to the zinc, opened his beak and
cackled like a hen, then flew away for more grubs.

I observed the starling a good deal after this, and found that
invariably on leaving the nest, he uttered his imitation of a fowl
cackling, and no other note or sound of any kind. It was as if he was
not merely imitating a sound, but had seen a fowl leaving the nest and
then cackling, and mimicked the whole proceeding, and had kept up the
habit after the young were hatched.

To return to my experience on the common. About fifty yards from the
spot where I was there was a dense thicket of furze and thorn, with a
huge mound in the middle composed of a tangle of whitethorn and bramble
bushes mixed with ivy and clematis. From this spot, at intervals of half
a minute or so, there issued the call of a duck--the prolonged, hoarse
call of a drake, two or three times repeated, evidently emitted in
distress. I conjectured that it came from one of a small flock of ducks
belonging to a cottage near the edge of the common on that side. The
flock, as I had seen, was accustomed to go some distance from home, and
I supposed that one of them, a drake, had got into that brambly thicket
and could not make his way out. For half an hour I heard the calls
without paying much attention, absorbed in watching the quaint little
songster close to me and his curious gestures when emitting his
sustained reeling sounds. In the end the persistent distressed calling
of the drake lost in a brambly labyrinth got a little on my nerves, and
I felt it as a relief when it finally ceased. Then, after a short
silence, another sound came from the same spot--a blackbird sound, known
to everyone, but curiously interesting when uttered in the way I now
heard it. It was the familiar loud chuckle, not emitted in alarm and