188 BIRD LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



sun, the yellow and scarlet carpet of last autumn's dead 

 ferns below, and the bits of blue sky overhead across which 

 flash the birds destined to bear posthumous testimony to 

 this argument of ours. Or we may wait for them in the 

 day time amongst the decoys, with success proportionate to 

 our knowledge of their habits and powers of hiding. 



Of four species of doves inhabiting Britain there is only 

 one really known to a non- ornithological public, or familiar 

 to those growers of corn and roots who naturally regard all 

 birds from the standpoint of their usefulness or destructive- 

 ness. This bird is the blue-rock, the cushat of the poets, 

 the quist, wood pigeon, and ring dove of country people. 

 About those turtle doves that come with the spring from 

 Algerian and Spanish olive gardens, the grower of swedes 

 and barley need not trouble himself. Country ramblers in 

 Kent or the Midlands, however, who keep their eyes open, 

 may have noticed wisps of these birds, in appearance a little 

 like missel-thrushes, with an extra allowance of tail, but 

 characterized by a true Columbian flight, rising from pea 

 stubbles or open stony glebes, where their colour matches 

 so exactly the surrounding wastes that they are invisible to 

 man or hawk until they rise on the wing. But these 

 " Wrekin doves," as they call them in Yorkshire, are not 

 numerous anywhere, and still less conspicuous even in the 

 select localities to which they return year after year. 

 Probably few other birds of their size in England are less 

 molested. Hardly ever shot at except by a young and radical 

 gamekeeper, or an early partridge shooter of an inquisitive 

 turn of mind, they use our woodlands for their nestings, and 

 get away again southward while hedgerows are thick and 

 the yellow autumn corn still nods to the south-westers. 



The stock dove, another of our four species, is very 

 generally confounded with the common blue pigeon by those 

 who ought to know better, though it must be conceded there 

 is much resemblance between them at a little distance. 

 Near at hand we may recognize the former by its lesser size, 



