30 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



these waders with a new power of living among them, 

 as other birds do in the air, so that they belong to 

 another dimension, which is aerial and yet of the earth. 

 They seem not so much to run over the ground as to 

 fly with closed wings, as if struck and propelled by 

 wandering breezes. Thus, concrete objects become shift- 

 ing and liquid and inseparable, and to their wavering 

 the wonderfully subtle and evanescent colouring of the 

 flats contributes appearing as they do on a fine day 

 opalescent, from which one might pick out pinkish- 

 greys running into blues, making roseate mauves, again 

 running into browns, and again into emerald and tur- 

 quoise. This soft interblending matches the flights of 

 the birds crossing and circling one another's tracks, 

 while through all are heard their plaintive, wild, and 

 musical cries, so fine and remote as to seem themselves 

 part of colour and light. 



This would have been all very well for an artist, but 

 your naturalist who cannot put a name to what he sees 

 is like the artist who cannot put a meaning to it. 

 Ringed plover, the charming little brown bird with a 

 black gorget on his white breast, was the most numerous 

 species, outnumbering the too sparse flocks of dunlin 

 (called " stints " here by the gunners), and soon identified 

 by the broad splash of black over the lower breast. 

 Curlew, too, were thinly distributed, and I saw but 

 few pigmy curlew (called clumsily in the books "curlew 

 sandpiper "), the duodecimo edition, so to speak, of 

 the curlew. I once had the good fortune to see a party 

 of fifty or sixty redshank dipping over the flats, but 

 greenshank a very shapely bird, readily distinguishable 

 from redshank, not so much by the muddy olive of 

 the legs hardly to be picked out from the mud, but by 

 their three inches larger size, deeper and rounder call, 

 conspicuous white rump, and more sedate and dignified 

 ways were much rarer. 



Sometimes, if one peers over the top of a turf bank, 

 one may see a small flock of grey plover feeding on the 

 mud. In build they recall the shape of their larger 

 cousins, the stone-curlew, or " thick-knee," being com- 

 pact, sturdy, and somewhat thickset. By the autumn, 



