At Home with Wild Nature 



the old barn. In the same district a few years after- 

 wards two boy friends of mine took a brood of young 

 brown owls out of a crow's old nest in a plantation near 

 their home and placed the birds in a cage suspended in 

 a shed, to which the old birds had easy access. I 

 happened to call at the farmhouse the following morn- 

 ing, and was appalled by the number of dead young 

 blackbirds and thrushes lying round the cage. 



In the summer of 1920 I spent three or four days 

 taking still and moving pictures of a hen ring ouzel 

 feeding and tending her young ones at the head of a 

 little North Country ghyll or valley, and was surprised 

 at the absolute absence of her mate. A few hundred 

 yards away I found a blackbird sitting in a nest built 

 in rough grass away from any bush or tree. Directly 

 her chicks were hatched she disappeared, and her mate 

 afterwards had every bit of the feeding and brooding of 

 the wee family to do all by himself. I felt sure some 

 deadly bird enemy was working the neighbourhood, and 

 a little lower down the valley found two young brown 

 owls in a hollow tree and lying beside them the wings of 

 an adult corncrake, those of a barn swallow, and 

 feathers that had unmistakably come from the body 

 of a grey wagtail, to say nothing of the plumage of 

 numerous chaffinches ! 



It is surprising how the wild life of any given 

 district ebbs and flows, without any reason to be 

 discovered by human observation in the course of a 

 decade or two. Twenty years ago I could, in a non- 

 game preserving district in the North of England, 



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