46 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



a necklace strung with four bright beads — has ever 

 afterwards remained as clearly impressed on me as on 

 the day it happened. 



Small flocks of wood-pigeons used to feed on the 

 saltings, and hordes of rooks frequently perched, some- 

 times with a kestrel or two perched near them, on the 

 telegraph wires. It is possible that in the event of the 

 disappearance of our woods, the rooks would still keep 

 a hold on existence, so extraordinarily adaptable is the 

 crow tribe to changes of condition. Ropes of starlings, 

 too, were to be seen on the wires in hundreds, each 

 strand a living, sentient, intelligent being, whose lustrous 

 plumage seems the index of the fire of life burning within. 



At Holkham, in the ugly, formal avenue leading through 

 the marshes from the Leicester estate to the sandhills, 

 I saw something I had looked for a long time in vain. 

 It was a wandering party of eight long-tailed tits, 

 waving their tiny wings as they passed by short stages, 

 and a prettj' switchback flight from one bush along the 

 drive to another. When they alighted before travelling 

 on again in single file, they looked a soft white (the 

 rose appears on the scapulars, flanks, belly and lower 

 part of the back, and is not conspicuous) among the 

 dark bushes, and the zee zee of their high, thin, stridu- 

 lating voices (the family call-note of the tits, but shriller, 

 weaker even than that of the cole-tit and altogether 

 more insect-like) sounded incessantly, as their minute, 

 slender, tapering bodies swung through the air. Here 

 was a joyous thing, for the long-tailed tit, never so 

 abundant as his four cousins, became so rare after the 

 hyperborean winter of 1916-17, that, if he diminishes 

 in numbers a little further, he will be doomed to the 

 glass case. The collector will have him, that sham 

 scientist and predatory clod who preys upon the mis- 

 fortunes of beautiful living things and, let them once 

 be rare, damns every bird to death. 



The wild geese, which come to the coast from Norway 

 in the autumn, I saw but once — on a golden-tawny spit 

 of land about a mile from the Wells foreshore, and safe 

 enough from the gunner to resume a pleasant social life. 

 Wonderful tales are told of them. It is said that they 



