CHAPTER VII 



A DEER FOREST IN JUNE 



IN a deer forest bird life is more plentiful and varied than 

 on a grouse moor. That arch egg-stealer, the grey crow, 

 is permitted to rear his family in peace, and the swift- 

 flying peregrine and lordly eagle hold undisputed sway 

 among the corries where the mists swerve and eddy. Per- 

 haps the best month of all the year in the forest is June. By 

 then the birches, always late of coming into leaf, are in all the 

 beauty of their first delicate greenness. By then, too, the 

 blaeberries — the whortleberries of the south — carpet the hill- 

 sides with fresh young leaves and blossoms of dusky reddish- 

 brown. On the sun-baked slopes the flowers of the cowberry 

 — known in the Highlands as the cranberry — cluster, some 

 white as snow, others tinged with pink, and in damp hollows 

 many ferns grow rapidly. By the loch-side much bird life 

 gathers of a still June evening. The greenshank, most wary 

 of waders, is there with her young brood. All through May 

 she was brooding her four beautiful pear-shaped eggs, con- 

 cealed amongst prostrate pine branches near the loch; and 

 now, with June, her downy youngsters are her pride. Most 

 active of chicks are the young greenshanks, and they conceal 

 themselves with remarkable skill. 



During the months of summer sandpipers haunt the loch. 

 They arrive some weeks later at their nesting quarters than 

 the greenshank, and it is not until mid-June or even later 

 that their young see the light of day. As the greenshank is 

 wild and wary, so is the sandpiper confiding, and one can 

 see them at their courting by the loch-side any day of May or 

 early June. With quickly repeated, shrill, whistling cries the 



30 



