OTHER BIRDS 79 



bough of a Scotch fir, and here as it lay 

 lengthways and perfectly still the bird looked 

 so like part of the branch itself that I couldn't 

 persuade a friend who was with me that it 

 was a bird until he actually saw it fly away. 

 After July 4th we heard no more of them, 

 and for a day or two before that the whirring 

 was much more interrupted, in shorter spells, 

 and varied more in intensity and clearness 

 than usual. 



Before the next spring came round the 

 Ship Canal had covered the river-bed with 

 another layer of mud dredgings, and we have 

 neither seen nor heard a nightjar in the 

 garden since, but in June, 1910, I heard from 

 the keeper that he had watched one flying 

 round an old black-poplar just opposite the 

 garden gate, flapping the ends of the boughs 

 with his wings and catching the moths that 

 were driven out. 



One of the most delightful of country 

 sounds is, I think, the laugh of the green 

 woodpecker, and when I heard that a pair of 

 woodpeckers were constantly to be seen 

 (January and February, 1901) about some 

 old poplars not far away, and that early one 

 morning one was working at the rotten posts 

 of a fence in the very next field, my hopes 

 were raised that even yet that welcome sound 

 might be heard from the garden. But the 

 birds turned out to be greater-spotted wood- 

 peckers and not green, and these do not 



