At Home with Wild Nature 



this way, and one day had the good fortune to come 

 upon a particularly bold individual on a heathery slope. 

 She had only three eggs, the fourth having been taken, 

 I found out, by a gentle shepherdess a few days 

 previously. 



Whilst kinematographing this bird at an unheard-of 

 close range, on account of the awkward contour of the 

 ground not allowing me to work farther away, she saw 

 something edible in the heather close at hand and thrust 

 her long, curved bill down to secure it, and I pictured 

 her in the act. Just as my supply of film was giving 

 out (interesting things nearly always happen then) 

 she saw something high in the air overhead which 

 greatly excited her curiosity, and she kept turning her 

 head first on one side and then the other in the prettiest 

 manner to gaze at it. 



Not far away a cock ring ouzel was piping his lone- 

 some notes from the top of a broken-down stone wall, 

 and I felt sure he had a nest where generations of his 

 forbears had built theirs in a " shak-hole "* close at 

 hand. Sure enough, there I found it, under a peat bank 

 upon which a trailing beard of heather grew and effec- 

 tually hid it from view. This bird is extremely 

 heterodox, if one may be allowed to use such a word 

 ornithologically, in regard to a nesting site. I have 

 found it in a hole where a stone had fallen out of an 

 old wall, on a ledge in the face of a little cliff, amongst 



* A funnel-shaped hole in the ground where the earth has been shaken 

 or washed down into some cavity in the limestone rock. Some of these 

 holes are forty or fifty feet in diameter and twenty to thirty in depth. 



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