The larks luckily take to the fields and do not trust themselves near either cats or gardeners.  They do not always escape even in the fields, and the dead bodies of some of them are served in a pudding in a Fleet Street restaurant.  But, on the whole, considering what a dangerous neighbour man is, they escape fairly lightly.  There is a sort of “live and let live” truce between them and the human race.  The chaffinches, too—­the greatest bird multitude there is, perhaps, after the house-sparrows—­are free enough to sing.  They have been, during the past week, sailing out on short voyages from the tops of trees, like flycatchers, dancing in the air after their victims and then returning to the spray.  The green-finch—­that beautiful-winged Mrs Gummidge among birds—­is also abundant, and slips down nervously every now and then among the groundsel in the unweeded garden.  I confess the greenfinch has all my sympathy, but it rather bores me.  What the deuce is it worrying about?  There is no poetry in its lamentation—­only a sort of habitual formula of a poor, lorn woman.  If birds could read, I think I should add to the notices I put up a little board containing the words: 

     “No bottles. 
     No hawkers,
     No greenfinches.”

I should feel really sorry if they took any notice of my notice, but it might convey a hint to them that it would be good policy on their part to cheer up for at least five minutes in the day and that, in any case, there is no need to say the same thing over and over again.  Every bird, it is true, says the same thing over and over again—­at any rate, more or less the same thing.  Birds such as the robin and the thrush vary their song as the chaffinch and the willow-wren do not.  But even the robin and the thrush have a recognisable pattern.  Fortunately, they are not always, like the greenfinch, thinking of the old ’un and thinking out loud.

The goldfinches have begun to fly about the garden again with their little sequins of song, as someone has delightfully described their music.  They have their eyes, I hope, on the pear-tree—­now as white as an Alp—­where they built and brought up a large family last year.  The cornflowers in the flower border are already in bud, and I am told that this is the temptation to which goldfinches most easily yield.  I hope so, at any rate.  I should have a garden blue with cornflowers, if I were sure that this would entice the seven colours of the goldfinch to make their home in it.  Last Saturday, two lesser spotted woodpeckers invaded the garden.  One always imagines a woodpecker as a bird of more substantial size, and it is surprising to see this little creature, patterned on the back like something made in the Omega workshop, no bigger than a sparrow, as it hastily visits apple and fig tree and even wygelia.  As it climbed the wygelia, indeed, a sparrow stooped down from an upper branch to study it, and then advanced in the direction of the woodpecker.  The woodpecker