DANGERS OF THE GROUND 175 



tridges especially, flourish most on the best-farmed lands. 

 They rejoice, both for nesting and for refuge, at other times 

 in any piece of waste ground ; and where these waste bits 

 have yielded to cultivation the ground-nesters have shrunk 

 in numbers, except under special and artificial preservation. 

 They do more than lose their proper haunt. Among the 

 standing crops, that after all resemble in some respects the 

 rough growths of untilled land, they suffer from the scythe 

 and the mower. The corncrake has quite vanished from 

 many old haunts. The valley of the Huntingdonshire Ouse 

 is one. One of the delights of warm June or July evenings, 

 spent in a boat along reaches that encircle a great plain 

 known as the Port Holm, was the strange mingling of 

 sounds, of which the corncrake's ventriloquial note was the 

 most insistent. The wind kept up a rustling whisper, a 

 secret sibilant mutter among the great banks of reeds. The 

 reed- warblers, by this date rather chattering than singing, 

 fluttered in and out ; and among the ranker grasses the 

 running corncrakes kept up a burr that recalled a frog or a 

 murmur of distant machinery or some vast grasshopper. 

 But the sound has been mute for many years, probably 

 owing to the greater precision and earliness with which the 

 grass is cut. The ground-nest, though immeasurably hard 

 to find if you desire it, could not compete with the blade on 

 the chariot wheel. So the south is in great measure robbed 

 of this quaint and pleasing summer visitor, though happily it 

 is still not less common in the far north. 



All nests, being in some degree cups, are liable to flood- 

 ing. One wet June a nuthatch's nest was found flooded out, 

 and the young dying of wet. They were rescued, the nest 

 drained, and the birds replaced, when some of the brood 

 survived ; but their plight showed that even a tree-hole, 

 carefully selected and at some altitude, is not quite storm- 



