At Home with Wild Nature 



On a little mound of earth left at its original eleva- 

 tion in one of these ancient turf pits, or " peat pots," as 

 we call them in Yorkshire, where the deposit sometimes 

 measures eight or ten feet instead of the same number of 

 inches on our Surrey moor, a redshank had made her 

 nest. It contained four of the most beautifully marked 

 eggs ever laid by any bird of her kind, I think. 



Fixing up my hiding-tent a few yards distant and 

 covering it with heather stalks, birch twigs and rushes, 

 I walked away in order to allow the yelping mother bird 

 to become familiar with its appearance. Surely a nest- 

 ing redshank is the noisiest bird that flies ! In Essex 

 the rustics call it " the tuke," because of the sound of 

 its alarm cry, which is very loud and oft-repeated. 

 Where a number of redshanks nest in proximity and the 

 countryside lends itself to echoes, the din they make, if 

 endured for half an hour on end, becomes perfectly 

 distracting. 



In a little while my redshank ceased to call tuke, 

 tuke, tuke, and, talking to herself in an undertone, 

 sidled round the hide-up and finally settled down upon 

 her nest. Like the curlew this bird made great use of 

 tree-tops as look-out stations. 



A few hours later I was duly tucked up with my 

 moving-picture camera in the hiding-tent, by a friend 

 who afterwards walked ostentatiously away. This ruse 

 completely deceived the redshank, and she returned in 

 something of a hurry for a member of her species. 

 Then, catching sight of my lens staring at her nest from 

 beneath a heavy eyebrow of heather, she jumped into 



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