THE BUILDERS 



57 



England before the yellow wagtails arrive, and they return in 

 August or early in September, a little before their tenderer 

 relations go south. They are larger and handsomer birds than 

 the yellow wagtails, and no less conspicuously yellow, when 

 they shake the bright patch beneath their tails in their gay 

 and restless flights. Yellow wagtails are a species which 

 flit about the cows in the summer meadows, in search of the 

 insects which they dis- 

 turb as they graze or lie 

 at rest ; and then they 

 allow us to come near 

 enough easily to distin- 

 guish the olive-green of 

 their upper plumage from 

 the grey mantle of the 

 species which we see by 

 the watersides, in the 

 same pastures from Au- 

 gust to February. Yellow 

 wagtails winter in West 

 Africa, and it is late May 

 or June before they nest 

 in their English haunts. 

 Pied wagtails are only 



partial migrants, and the home-staying pairs build in mid- 

 April, though the majority arrive about that time, and nest 

 about the end of the month. But most of our British grey 

 wagtails go no further south in winter than our own southern 

 counties ; and their hardier habits enable them to return 

 very early in spring to their upland streams, so that they 

 are busy about their nests all through April. No group of 

 British birds illustrates the nice gradations of the migratory 



habit more clearly than these three beautiful wagtails. 



CUttg) o 



YELLOW WACTAIL 



