190 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



I was inspecting it the parent bird (the female had 

 flown right away on my approach) was swinging 

 his restless, shadowy form (it is quite easy to dis- 

 tinguish from the sedge-warbler, whose back is fretted, 

 the reed's being uniform) among the columns of the 

 reeds, singing and scolding with all his might. The 

 bird was never more than two or three yards away 

 from me, and I caught the girding notes in the song 

 full. But it struck me as very beautiful, copious, re- 

 fined, sparkling with high-lights of lucid and pene- 

 trating notes, a breeze among harebells, sometimes soft 

 as the golden-tinted down shed by the sun upon the 

 evening sky. In the same clump, some five feet from 

 the ground, I was surprised to find a blackbird's nest 

 with eggs (a second brood, no doubt), suspended and 

 woven among the stalks (though with less art) in the 

 same way as the reed-warbler's — a unique discovery 

 in its way. 



I then walked on for another mile, until I emerged 

 from the banks of the river before a house with used- 

 up, dusty, short grass in front of it. Between the 

 bank and the house was a small sand-bank with a 

 few holes in it, ex-residences of the sand-martin, who, 

 like his congeners, becomes rarer every year. I stood 

 idly looking at it, when into one of the holes plunged 

 a kingfisher, and I got within a dozen feet of the front- 

 door before out he came like the sun from a cloud, 

 flame out of coal, an inspiration from the mind, out 

 from the tawny sand, a Psyche of iridescent coloured 

 lights ! Things were bound to fall a bit flat after 

 this, but returning homewards, I was pleased to find 

 a nuthatch's nest half-way up the trunk of a birch, 

 a neat hole, carefully plastered with clay to prevent 

 the incursion of any house-breaking starlings. Wood- 

 peckers are not such a match for the starling as the 

 nuthatch.^ The dragon-flies, vibrating their translucent 

 wings in a jewelled mist above the guelder-roses near 



^ It is Just possible tliat sparrows and starlings (related to 

 the parasitic cow-birds of the Argentine) are beginning to take 

 the wrong turning in life. In bygone ages the cuckoo probably 

 began sowing her wild oats by stealing nests. 



