Birds by Land and Sea 



she made a decided approach, but still lingered at 

 the mouth of the hole in which it was placed, to 

 survey us critically ere trusting her head to disappear 

 within it. Having distributed the food she had 

 brought, she took another good look at us, and then 

 set off to canvass the trees for more. We took 

 advantage of her absence to count her six chicks, 

 noting the robin-like character of her nest and its 

 situation, placed, as it was, in a hole in the ivy- 

 covered stump of a felled oak. The wood, 

 saving the undergrowth, was almost entirely of 

 oaks, and the ground, deep in dead leaves through 

 which nettle and bracken were breaking, overrun 

 with ivy. 



We set the camera up as if it were an outgrowth 

 from a neighbouring tree, and were allowed to work 

 at a distance of six feet without the need of laying 

 on tubing. Deceived by the visual illumination of 

 the nest, we failed to allow sufficiently for the degra- 

 dation in actinic energy of light in a thick wood, 

 and spent a long day in getting what promised to be 

 a superb series of pictures, to find, when developing 

 them afterwards, that they were ghostly in their 

 thinness. 



There is a great difference in the appearance of 

 the male and the female redstart. The former, with 

 his white forehead, black throat, and bright red breast 

 and tail, makes the female seem a dull bird by 

 contrast ; still, the grey of the upper parts of the 

 female, the breast, flanks, and under tail-coverts, are 



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