WILD LIFE IN SEVERN ESTUARY 15 



reveals at a glance the kind of harvest the birds 

 have gathered. On the damp surface just at the 

 lowest part of the bottom there lies a small heap 

 of sea shrimps, mostly dead but with some of the 

 survivors still gasping in the hot sun. The high 

 spring tides brought the shrimps here but the 

 treacherous sea has gone and so left them. We 

 speak of the unerring instinct of nature, but often, 

 as in this case, it is indeed no more unerring than 

 the chequered wisdom of man. 



With the incoming tide the sea-birds move from 

 the beach to higher quarters, and where the long 

 line of the Mendips drops at last into the sea the 

 slopes of the cliff are dotted with white plumage. 

 It is a steep climb upwards. The springy turf 

 which clothes the high ground is close-cropped and 

 the little rock-rose, a botanical survival almost 

 peculiar in Britain to this headland, stars the green 

 in places. The view opens over the water till it 

 includes, far in the mist on the horizon, the spectral- 

 seeming ships on the sea roads. They might indeed 

 be phantom ships of another world for all the relation 

 they have to this. Thus have they passed day by 

 day, even since Cabot set his prow to the setting 

 sun on these waters and discovered a western 

 continent ; and thus have they passed long before 

 him. But the wilderness is still the wilderness here. 

 In some of the almost inaccessible slopes the rabbits 

 find safe refuge and their white cotton tails twinkle 

 everywhere as they scud to their holes at the ap- 

 proach of an intruder. 



This is the nesting-ground of the great shelducks, 

 the characteristic sea-fowl of the mud-flats of the 

 Severn Estuary. The birds circle round uneasily in 



