APRIL IN BROADLAND 39 



birth to ! There ! it's just as we predicted. The grebes, emboldened by our silence, 

 have been paddling well this way. How rapidly they swim ! There's at least half- 

 a-dozen of them. Now they dive. One has suddenly appeared above water with a 

 juvenile roach between its mandibles. A couple fly past us in grotesque flight, 

 with necks extended, and with hanging feet. This characteristic bird of Broadland 

 was at one time in danger of extermination, when the craze for grebe-skin muffs 

 and trimmings was stronger than the dictates of humanity and reason. Keed- 

 warblers peer out from the yellow reedstems. They will shortly be nesting. But 

 we will forbear to trespass on their privacy. Weaving their cup of a nest when 

 the young green shoots are but a few inches above the waters, as we see them now, 

 and using some three or four as a kind of scaffolding, little by little it is lifted 

 as the reeds grow longer, until, by the time the greenish-white, brown-blotched 

 eggs have become replaced by the downy chicks that inhabited them, it is suspended 

 at least a yard in air ! 



A little bay sweeps away on our left. The clicking of the coots has some- 

 what subsided. Surely there must have been some scandal going on this morning 

 amongst them. See ! a dark object has just come out from the reeds into the 

 open water; another follows. Those white foreheads make the coots' identity 

 unmistakeable. Three or four red-billed moorhens are cautiously paddling in an 

 opposite direction. There now ! your clumsy stumbling on that oar has caught 

 their quick ears and vision. How the moorhens take to startled flight, trailing 

 their long feet upon the surface of the water until rows of bubbles follow their 

 receding forms ! The coots dive under and we see no more of them. They evi- 

 dently come up in the reedy phalanx where the eye cannot penetrate. 



Behind the reed-bed is a clump of alders. Willows point upwards their slen- 

 der twigs. Behind them, and where the taller trees blot out the landscape beyond, 

 are some silver beeches, contrasting their slender grey trunks against the deep 

 green of the fir-trees which bear them company. On the topmost bough of one 

 of them a great blue heron has just alighted. What a grotesque fellow does he 

 appear as, balancing himself with his huge wings, he clutches the slender perch 

 with his big strong toes and claws ! Those beeches are as dead as can be. Some 

 years ago the herons nested in the branches, but the onslaughts of prejudiced 

 keepers ousted them, and they have elsewhere started their heronry. That fellow 

 yonder, with his beautiful ' apron,' is in magnificent plumage. He has simply 

 come to take a passing survey ; and will make up his mind, as he did last year, 

 that to build here his home will be useless. With a harsh ' Frank I ' he takes to 

 wing and winnows his way to some ditches where the frogs are making amorous 



