A DORSET DIARY 149 



ground, all waving with feathery grasses, tilted gently 

 down to a narrow stream or ditch crowded in with 

 pollard willows, alders and more bramble and fields 

 spread widely out from its old and lichened apple-trees 

 on three sides ; so that it was a well-chosen site for a 

 Parliament of Foules. Hither came regularly all three 

 woodpeckers, the greater spotted most of all. I once 

 crept to within a few inches of him when he was probing 

 an apple-tree bark on the further side of me, and we 

 both popped our heads over the gap where it forked 

 into branches at one and the same moment. My vis- 

 d-vis was paralysed with astonishment, and for about 

 five seconds he gaped at me as I at his white cheeks 

 and forehead, black crown and scarlet nape, before he 

 sped away, winding among the boles with loud ex- 

 clamations of alarm. The lesser spotted or " barred " 

 woodpecker usually kept to the tops of the elms, but 

 he once perched among the branches of an overturned 

 tree on whose root I was sitting, a duodecimo edition 

 in his barred plumage of the chequered sunlight entangled 

 in the dark matted twigs. Hither, too, came the lovely 

 diamonded wryneck, announcing his presence by his 

 thrice-repeated peal and striking terror perhaps into 

 the ants clustering the lichened boles. I saw him every 

 day for a week, and I vow he got used to me. Then 

 he disappeared and I never saw him more. For how 

 many years longer will English orchards shelter the 

 " cuckoo's boder," a romantic bird gradually failing 

 us and so doomed in the future to end his days in a 

 glass case ? Here, too, stridulated the grasshopper 

 warbler ; small breakdown gangs of goldfinches used 

 to float the tree-tops like motes of sun and set to work 

 to clear the thistle-heads by the stream ; a sparrow- 

 hawk occasionally policed the hedges and a butcher- 

 bird appeared now and again, though his pitch was 

 elsewhere. High in the greenery of one of the elms a 

 wood-wren quartered himself for some time, and I used 

 to make a point of sitting at its foot in the evening to 

 hear his leafy song, preluded by bright strokes — chit, 

 chit, chit, chit — running with beautiful abandon into a 

 quavering trill, as he shivered his long, bright wings. 



