138 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



inexplicable behind with which I can always get in 

 touch, whether voluntarily or through no will of my own. 



October I6th (1918). A distinguished day. I saw for 

 the first time here a wild raven. It flew low over my 

 head and disappeared over the edge of the cliff, 

 vigorously mobbed by a pair of rooks. This raven exists 

 in legendary account among the numerous small villages 

 inland and by the coast, but I have never met with 

 anyone who saw it in the flesh. Needless to say, I kept 

 my privilege to myself. I never saw this splendid, 

 traditional bird again, and indeed I can scarce credit 

 the fact that I did see it. So far as I know, there are 

 no near breeding-places of the raven on the coast. Per- 

 haps I had been walking, not from the village to the sea, 

 but from the present to the past, from the extraordinary 

 to the normal in bird-life, to a time when ravens grew 

 like blackberries in the fields of the air. On some 

 stunted bushes within a hundred yards of the fishing 

 village I came upon half a dozen lesser redpoles, very 

 passive and tame, being, I suppose, tired out after their 

 long journey from the North. In the village the swallows 

 were congregated on the telegraph wires, preparing for 

 migration, and among them was an albino, all over 

 greyish white. 



There was a handsome barn along the road, where a 

 pair of swallows were rearing a late brood, and I used 

 to spend some time every day lying on the hay 

 watching the parent birds feed their young. At this 

 time, the young (four in number) were out of the nest 

 and used to sit transversely across an oak beam a foot 

 below the rafters, silent and statuesque until the parents 

 came dashing in like light under the lintel of the door, 

 when they would instantly come to life, fluttering their 

 wings, jerking their bodies over the edge of the beam, 

 and mouths all agape, whence burst a storm of twittering. 

 Now I am quite certain of my facts. The parents had 

 two chicks each under charge, and invariably fed their 

 own pair, hovering before them. 1 They not only fed 



1 One cannot, of course, distinguish the sexes of swallows, 

 but the point is that each pair of chicks was in the charge of a 



