:8o Poachers and Poaching. 



Later in summer the young brood may be seen 

 with open quivering wings, constantly calling 

 as the parent birds fly up and down stream. 

 Their food consists almost entirely of fish 

 throughout the year, though during the rigour 

 and frosts of winter they betake themselves to 

 the estuaries of tidal rivers, where their food of 

 molluscs and shore-haunting creatures are daily 

 replenished by the tides. Kingfishers are among 

 the most persistent of trout-stream poachers, and 

 as many as eighty of these beautiful birds have 

 been killed in a season on a famous nursery in 

 the midlands. As in the case of the heron, 

 nothing will save the fry from these marauders 

 but covering in the rearing ponds with the finest 

 wire net. However one may wish to protect 

 the kingfisher, there is no denying the fact of its 



almost perpendicular, his head thrown back between his 

 shoulders ; eyeing with an abstracted air the heavens above or 

 the rocks around him, he seemed intent only upon exhibiting 

 the glorious lustre of his plumage, and the brilliant colours with 

 which his azure back was shaded; but let a careless samlet stray 

 beneath him, and in a twinkling his nonchalant attitude was 

 abandoned. With a turn so quick that the eye could scarce 

 follow it, his tail took the place of his head, and, falling rather 

 than flying, he would seize his victim, toss him once into the 

 air, catch him as he fell, head foremost, and swallow him in a 

 second. This manoeuvre he would repeat from morning till 

 night; such a greedy, insatiable little wretch I never saw!" 

 Tbe Autobiography of a Salmon. 



