THE HARRIERS 17^ 



for hunting, sleeping, or nesting. You will see large pieces 

 of thistle-stalk and sedge piled carelessly about. Thus 

 silently exhorted, the darker, bigger, more richly feathered 

 female begins to build in earnest, choosing a little hill amongst 

 the rush, or, if none such is to be found, piling high the 

 stuff, so the wet shall not penetrate to the eggs. And once 

 she begins her nest, at the end of June or beginning of July, 

 he falls to and helps her — in fact, doing the lion's share — 

 piling high the sedge, rush, and thistle-stalk, till the littered 

 pile is pronounced finished. Indeed, she does little work 

 at any time, rarely "working" more than twice or thrice a 

 day. And when the first hen-like egg is laid, she begins 

 to sit at once, and very closely she sits ; you might pass 

 within a yard, but she'll not heed you, nor will he, if he 

 be near. 



Again, when the four young ones are hatched, he does the 

 catering, beating over the warrens and marshes for young 

 rabbits and leverets, which he brings and drops on a heap 

 of stuff, hovering some twenty yards above the ground as 

 he drops the food on the eminence; and she, when hungry, 

 comes off her nest and eats her meal leisurely on the heap, 

 casting up any indigestible pellets of bone or fur. 



And when the young are strong on the wing, you see 

 them beating a few yards above the reeds, hunting for late 

 eggs, or else feeding upon big dragonflies, a favourite food 

 with them when the egg season is past. 



A strange irony of fate is this by which a " tom-breeze " or 

 dragonfly himself hawks through a cloud of midges at sunset, 

 snapping them up as he flies through them like a swallow, 

 and then is himself snapped up by a hungry marsh-harrier 

 as the pale moon is rising in the sky ; for the birds work 

 till nearly dusk in the late summer evenings ; and if you 

 disturb any of the family, they'll go shaling up into the 

 greying blue, round and round, sometimes shrieking like 

 kittiwakes over the green sea of rush ; for the rush marsh is 

 dearest to them ; indeed, their nest, as often as not, is merely 



