THE FLATS 35 



himself a joy " be replaced by the naturahst who 

 " kisses the joy as it flies." But will it come too late ? 

 Such friendships are obviously more interesting than 

 the commensalism that exists between the crocodile and 

 the spur-winged plover, which is based on mutual self- 

 interest, though a kindly supererogatory sentiment may 

 develop from it. How little we know of the psychology 

 of bird-life ! We know a great deal about the anatomy of 

 birds — the principles of classification and distribution and 

 the rest of it ; of their lives or their relation to one another, 

 to nature, and to ourselves, we know next to nothing.^ 



The appearance of these waders out upon the inscrut- 

 able marshes is so vanishing, and their wild, bubbling, 

 seemingly bodiless cries, often beautifully inflected, are 

 so rhythmical, that it is natural to think of them as 

 always in motion, and their motions themselves as figures 

 in a dance. 



There is a constant procession of thin shapes flashing 

 across the vision, and little parties of birds dash over the 

 ground like sudden inspirations too elusive to be retained 

 — sanderling, ringed plover, redshank, whose plaintive, 

 musical tuhuhu tuhuhu — ^the most characteristic among 

 their several cries — is like the voice of some intangible, 

 passing figure seen in dream. Even the bathing of these 

 waders has a ceremonious grace, and being nymphs as 

 much of the water as the land, they flirt little showers 

 over their backs and curtsey their breasts into the 

 water as though they glided from one device in the formal 

 round to another. Once I watched a party of redshank 

 bathing in a strip of pool, and suddenly one of them was 

 taken with a frenzy of high spirits. Trailing feet, he 

 hurled himself from one end to the other and back again, 

 clapping his beautiful angular wings over his back and 



1 That sound naturalist, Alfred W. Rees, who died a few years 

 ago, writes in one of his books : " In those rare, brief intervals 

 of outdoor study when, to my surprise and delight, I have caught 

 a glimpse of what, for want of a better phrase, might be termed 

 the humanity of Nature, I have not merely imagined, but have 

 felt sure, that many of the finest feelings of man — ^pity, sympathy, 

 devotion, unselfish comradeship — are shared in no small measure 

 by creatures considered to be far beneath our plane of life." 



