THE KINGFISHER'S BROOD 397 



form or colour, it is sound or movement or scent, 

 which scares the animal or bird you would wish to 

 watch. Stand stock-still, and a hare or weasel will 

 sometimes lollop right up to you, and look you in 

 the face. A rabbit will run up almost against your 

 legs ; a woodpigeon will pitch, and remain perched, 

 within a few yards of your head. Move a muscle, 

 wink with your eye, and they are off. On that 

 saaae bough, a few weeks later, if fortune favours 

 you, you will, after often listening to the cries of the 

 hungry and fast-growing young kingfishers, deep 

 within the earth, have the happiness of seeing some 

 four or five of them sitting in a row, side by side, 

 and already decked in something like their full 

 plumage, waiting with impatient patience, till the 

 ever-active parent returns with a dragon-fly or a 

 water-beetle, a gudgeon or a minnow, in her beak 

 to feed them. If the stream is scantily supplied, as 

 this one is, with fish which, by the way, is, I think, 

 the reason why they do not stay with us all the 

 year and the parent-bird has to go far afield to 

 find them, she is enabled, by a kind provision of 

 Nature, to swallow several of them, and bring them 

 back half-digested, and therefore, doubly ready 

 for the delicate frames of her ravenous young. The 

 petrels or " mutton-birds " of the Furneaux Islands, 



