OF THE MARSH 197 



until, with a whisk of her white tail coverts, she shot 

 through the first opening, and so to cover again. If 

 there were only three miles of willows to grub, the 

 Fiend might yet learn more than he "went out for 

 to see." 



Above him, as he works, hundreds of Sand-martins 

 ply to and fro with their chopping, bat-like flight. 

 Time was when these willows were the nightly 

 resort of something between one and two thousand 

 hirundines, chiefly Sand-martins, and often I have 

 been there at evening to watch the birds come in and 

 race over the water a bewildering maze of motion 

 in which every unit follows its own track. Only 

 when the high clouds, catching fire from the sunken 

 sun, had burnt themselves to a grey ash, did the 

 multitudinous motion become an equally multitudinous 

 sound; for the willow wands were then loaded with 

 birds, flitting and fluttering, fanciful in their choice 

 of a sleeping perch, and when suited, settling only to 

 join in the excited evensong of the twittering host. 

 In the end, with the failing light, how suddenly they 

 were hushed so many voices, so simultaneously ! 

 Stranger than the sound itself was the ceasing of it. 



A number of these willows were cut down to the 

 roots last year, and the birds thereupon forsook the 

 spot as a sleeping haunt. Now they gather every 

 evening above the river, disperse, and gather again, 

 and so on until, just before sunset, one of their 

 number with an insistent call-note leads the way, and 

 all withdraw for the night in a skirmishing flight to 

 the north-west, which is the direction of the river at 

 this point. 



Arriving Redshanks must have overlapped the 



