It Is Too Silent Even Now:

There are the leading notes; but the undertone - the vibration of the organ - is but just beginning.

It is the hum of insects and their ceaseless flitting that make the summer more than the birds or the sunshine. The coming of summer is commonly marked in the dates we note by the cuckoo and the swallow and the oak leaves; but till the butterfly and the bee - one with its colour, and one with its hum - fill out the fields, the picture is but an outline sketch. The insects are the details that make the groundwork of a summer day. Till the humble-bees are working at the clover it is too silent; so I think we may begin our almanack with the house-fly and the moth and the spider and the ant on the cucumber frame, and so on, till, finally, the catalogue culminates with the great yellow wasp. He is the final sign of summer; one swallow does not make it, one wasp does. He is a connoisseur of the good things of the earth, and comes not till their season.

On the top of an old wall covered with broad masses of lichen, the patches of which grew out at their edges as if a plate had taken to spreading at its rim, the tits were much occupied in picking out minute insects; the wagtails came too, sparrows, robins, hedge-sparrows, and occasionally a lark; a bare blank wall to all appearance, and the bare lichen as devoid of life to our eyes. Yet there must have been something there for all these eager bills - eggs or pupae. A jackdaw, with iron-grey patch on the back of his broad poll, dropped in my garden one morning, to the great alarm of the small birds, and made off with some large dark object in his beak - some beetle or shell probably, I could not distinguish which, and should most likely have passed the spot without seeing it. The sea-kale, which had been covered up carefully with seaweed, to blanch and to protect it from the frost, was attacked in the cold dry weather in a most furious manner by blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings. They tore away the seaweed with their strong bills, pitching it right and left behind them in as workmanlike style as any miner, and so boring deep notches into the edge of the bed. When a blackbird had made a good hole he came back to visit it at various times of the day, and kept a strict watch. If he found any other blackbird or thrush infringing on his diggings, he drove him away ferociously. Never were such works carried on as at the edge of that seaweed; they moved a bushel of it. To the eye there seemed nothing in it but here and there a small white worm; but they found plenty, and the weather being so bitter, I let them do much as they liked; I would rather feed than starve them.

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