THE RAILWAY EMBANKMENT 



suggested that it may be the river which makes the 

 sedge warbler so songful by night and day. But it 

 is just worth considering as a theory, not more. 



The railway embankment is as favoured by butter- 

 flies and day-flying moths this June as I found it last 

 year. The lovely little heath moth has been out in 

 numbers since the beginning of the month. It has 

 none of the brave apparel of the wood tiger and the 

 cinnabar moths which also fly by day along the slope, 

 being a greyish little thing, flaccid almost as the snow- 

 white plume moth, but far warier than he. The 

 pattern on the upper wings of the heath, yellowish 

 with wavy brown stripes, is neat as neat can be : to 

 describe it truly you want language fine and pointed 

 as an etching pen, a tongue of diminutives. 



The flight of the heath moth is not so weak as one 

 might expect from such limp-looking wings and body, 

 but it is highly erratic, like that of many moths and 

 butterflies with thin bodies and wings that seem as 

 if they had no muscles to work them. Like the " car- 

 pet " moths and notably the orange-tip and the white 

 butterflies, the heath moth zigzags along. The move- 

 ments, on the wing, of an orange-tip butterfly and a 

 small bird say a chaffinch or a larger one say a 

 green woodpecker are so entirely unlike that one may 

 wonder whether the same principles are here at work. 

 The bird seems to bound through the air in a clean 



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