26 BIRD LIFE THROUGHOUT THE YEAR 



abbey, now the seat of a titled family, where at all 

 hours of the day moorhens may be seen stalking about 

 the well-kept lawns, we are told that as many as sixty 

 come to be fed in winter. They are pugnacious birds, 

 for as we watch them we note that every now and then 

 one rushes at another to offer battle. The second 

 party, however, always declines the combat, so that 

 only a violent chase results. In this respect they 

 resemble their neighbours the Coots, upon the lake, 

 which spend much of their time in quarrelling, splashing 

 through the water, half flying, half swimming. Such 

 are some of the small comedies of these January days, 

 with tragedies enough not far in the background, for 

 winter has not seldom a sterner side of which it remains 

 to tell. 



HARD TIMES 



At wholly uncertain intervals come these unwonted 

 frosts, bringing what we cheerfully term " a good old- 

 fashioned winter," but causing to the birds wide-spread 

 disaster, so that, had they their annals, the years 

 when such occur would rank with those of the Black 

 Death and of the retreat from Moscow. For memories 

 of ice-bound ponds which " bore " for ten weeks at a 

 stretch and of mornings when the screened thermometer 

 showed thirty-one degrees of frost, we must go back to 

 the late seventies or early eighties, but the frost of the 

 early part of 1895, though it did not tighten its grip 



