Pond Life 
will often visit ponds where they are 
never seen during the summer months. 
But at last, perhaps, comes a day when 
the water is frozen hard, and the ring- 
ing of skates is heard instead of the 
croaking cries of the moorhens. Then 
the snipe visits the banks of the quickly 
running streams where it can find un- 
frozen feeding-places, and the moorhens 
travel about down the ditches and hedge- 
sides, and the coots and wild ducks betake 
themselves elsewhere, perhaps to the 
coast. The herons, too, can no longer 
stalk about in the shallows, and they 
have to find some other place which will 
afford food, possibly at the nearest river 
or tidal estuary if there is one within 
reach, where the ebbing tide, they 
know, will afford any quantity of food as 
the mud-banks are left. Here they can 
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