THROUGH THE YEAR 13 



element is water not air, and its habit, above 

 all, is to hide in tangled water-ways. 



It harmonises with its environment, not through 

 form or colour matching, but through perfect still- 

 ness. I have flushed two or three moorhens in a 

 field, and they have half-flown, half run to a small 

 deep pond, which on one side has a few overhanging 

 bushes and some coarse herbage and water weeds. 

 I have gone to the pond, seen some disturbance 

 on the water, and, on this ceasing, there has been 

 absolute quiet. Peer where I will, I cannot see a 

 faint sign of the birds. I may wait ten minutes, 

 a quarter of an hour, but nothing stirs. Yet the 

 moorhens are there, and a dog will move them at 

 once if it enters the water. 



It is the same with the rails and the crakes. They 

 live a life of skulking and creeping amid herbage, 

 and, if you flush them, after a short laboured flight 

 they are down again in the tangle. A Norfolk 

 sportsman told me that only once in many years 

 had he seen one of the smallest of the crakes he 

 could not say whether it was the little crake, which 

 is only a casual winter visitor to England, or the 

 rare Baillon's crake, which has nested in the Eastern 

 counties. It sank down soon after it was flushed 

 into quite a small patch of thick marsh herbage 

 amid a bare field. He went up with his spaniels, 

 but though they scoured the whole place nothing 

 could be seen of the bird, and the search was at 

 length given up. It would not rise, and it could 

 not be found. 



