At Home with Wild Nature 



return of the mother thrush, when he was quickly made 

 to understand that his interference, however well 

 intentioned, in her household affairs was not appre- 

 ciated. 



Whilst studying wild bird life in the Outer Hebrides 

 in 1904 I fell in with the boldest dunlin I have ever tried 

 to photograph. Her confidence in me was unbounded, 

 and nothing I did seemed to frighten her. If I left my 

 hiding-tent to remove some offending blade of grass 

 waving in the foreground she only ran a few feet away 

 and was back again on her eggs before I had time to re- 

 establish myself behind the camera. After a nocturnal 

 deluge of rain I revisited the place to see how she was 

 faring, and found her in sad plight. The nest was half 

 full of water, and a newly hatched young one drowned 

 inside it. I built the structure up out of the flood by 

 the addition of a handful or two of dry grass and 

 returned the three remaining chipped eggs, with the 

 satisfactory result that the chicks were all hatched off 

 and taken away in safety. A day or two afterwards I 

 was watching them running about with their parents, 

 when, to my astonishment, a skylark singing blithely 

 overhead abruptly finished his song, descended to the 

 ground, and discovering some eligible item of food 

 secured it and tried to give it to one of the young 

 dunlins. This charitable action angered the mother 

 bird mightily. Spreading her neck feathers out she set 

 herself in the fighting attitude of a ruff, and ignomin- 

 iously drove the skylark away. 



A lady friend of mine one day noticed to her great 



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