i 4 4 THE BIRDS OF OUR RAMBLES. 



now abroad amongst us ; and we may even yet 

 live to see them parcelled out into allotments for 

 a working man's Arcadia, if the party cry of 

 " three acres and a cow " be started once more in 

 earnest by ousted politicians thirsting for plunder, 

 place, and power, and eager to climb thereto 

 upon the shoulders of their easily duped consti- 

 tuents, or at the cost of wrecking institutions that 

 are a Briton's pride the wide world over. But 

 birds and politics ill agree, and we trust the moor- 

 lands may never become the arena of party war- 

 fare, and may long be free from aught but their 

 feathered inhabitants. With this expression of 

 opinion we will make our way upon them in quest 

 of ornithological knowledge. 



The most characteristic bird of the moors is 

 widely the RED GROUSE (Tetrao scoticus). He is the one 



distributed. i_ j r ,1 i 



Except s. or bird we arQ sure of meeting upon their brown 

 drawn from wastes, no matter what the time or season we 

 choose to walk across them. He is by no means 

 easily overlooked ; for he stands conspicuously 

 enough upon the big boulders of millstone grit, 

 or even on the copings of the dry walls that 

 separate the moors from the highway and the 

 rough upland pastures. Then he rises from our 

 feet with a soul-stirring whirr of wing and a 

 startling cry of go-bac, bac-bac-bac, and flies across 

 the heather or skims over the shoulder of the hill 

 to find that solitude his soul best loves. Summer 

 or winter he is just the same the one bird that 

 is inseparably associated with the heather. We 

 Britishers should feel proud of him ; for small 

 as our islands are, he may only be met with on 

 their moorland wastes ; he is peculiar to our 

 country our one national bird, the island repre- 



