April 22. Many people have said to me about Weihaiwei, "does not the absence of birds worry you—don't you miss them afte the vast numbers we have in Shanghai?
The answer to such a question is best de with by the following entry I made in last week. My Weihaiwei garden is haunted by many birds: sparrows are a pleasure to the eye ff-brown plumage, clean as a whistle, in place of the sooty little rascals living in our Shanghai gutters: the intelligent house-swallow which built on top of my electric light has left me, but her place has been taken by a red-rumped swallow whose bottle-shaped nest is already inhabited: the Meadow Bunting still sings from my chimney-top while Titmice collect insects from the apple trees: Hoopoes arrived early in Apri! and flash their brilliant crests among the fir trees: little bands of Greenfinches flying in the sun look like something stolen from a rainbow. Up in the hills shore-larks haunt the undergrowth while great handsome partridges (known as Chukor) go screaming over the valleys to land on a distant rock repeating their minatory call of "Lookout, look-out-look-out": migrant birds come and go'according to their season... and sometimes it is all so beautiful I am unable to believe it is true. Years ago I wrote about meeting frogs marching downhill, and wondered if they were merely repeating the history of the famous Duke who had 10,000 men and marched them up a high hill merely for the pleasure of marching them down again. This year I found the true answer which is worth recording.
Visiting the little rock pool from which I imagined the frogs to have come, I found large numbers of thrushes; Grey-backed with red flanks and Dusky Ousels with breasts bedecked with deep brown necklaces: they were crowded round this tiny pool and would not move when I disturbed them: with frog-spawn on their feet from the low-lying marshes, they had deposited in the pool from which the frogs will subsequently make their downward march. And so I say, when people ask me the above-mentioned question, "No. There are no birds in Weihaiwei. unless you have the eyes to see them."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.