The secret of observation is this: Stillness, silence and apparent indifference.
In some instinctive way, wild creatures learn to distinguish when one is not intent upon them in a spirit of enmity.
And, if very near, it is always the eye they watch.
So long as you observe them, as it were, from the corner of the eyeball, sideways, or look over their heads at something beyond, it is well.
Turn your glance full upon them to get a better view and they are gone.
When waiting in a dry ditch with a gun on a warm autumn afternoon for a rabbit to come out, sometimes a bunny will suddenly appear at the mouth of a hole which your knee nearly touches.
He stops dead, as if petrified with astonishment, sitting on his haunches.
His full dark eye is on you with a gaze of intense curiosity; his nostrils work as if sniffing; his whiskers move; and every now and then he thumps with his hind legs upon the earth with a low dull thud.
This is evidently a sign of great alarm at the noise of which any other rabbit within hearing instantly disappears in the “bury.”
Yet there your friend sits and watches you as if spellbound, so long as you have the patience neither to move hand or foot nor to turn your eye.
Keep your glance on a frond of the fern just beyond him, and he will stay.
The instant your eye meets his or a finger stirs, he plunges out of sight.
It is so also with birds.
Walk across a meadow swinging a stick, even humming, and the rooks calmly continue their search for grubs within thirty yards.
Stop to look at them, and they rise on the wing directly.
So, too, the finches in the trees by the roadside.
Let the wayfarer pass beneath the bough on which they are singing, and they will sing on if he moves without apparent interest.
Should he pause to listen, their wings glisten in the sun as they fly.
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