238 WILD BIRDS 



Yet, faced by problems simple even to an infant 

 whose understanding is just lighting up, bird and 

 beast are wholly lost. The logic of a dog is probably 

 the best logic of the mind in the animal world outside 

 ourselves. Yet who has really known a dog that 

 "reasoned"? 



ILLUMINED GREBES 



I know scarcely a surer touch of early spring 

 though it is a small touch than brephos on the 

 wing once more, the gay little orange underwing 

 moth of daylight. Seen aloft, among the birch 

 trees, in the spring sunshine, brephos, as it flutters 

 along in its vague way, looks exactly like the brown 

 vapourer moth of early autumn. It may come out 

 in the last three or four days of March perhaps, after 

 a day and night of soaking wet ; and year after year 

 I have seen it among the birch plantations on the 

 same kind of day in early spring, sometimes in 

 March, more often perhaps in April a day of divine 

 air and sunshine, when one hopes to hear the notes 

 of the earliest chiff-chaff and when blackbirds are 

 crooning and singing in snatches in the morning. 

 Another touch of early spring is the return to their 

 nesting quarters of the great crested grebes which 

 spend the winter on the sea coast. There are many 

 bays along the south coast where the grebes can be 

 seen in winter. Near Poole Harbour in December I 

 watched one quite close to the strand. A few weeks 

 before I had seen a pair a little further out at sea, 

 near a party of half a dozen tufted ducks. The 



