MAY 107 



Lapwings often sit while the grass around them is 

 white with frost in the early mornings. The Grouse 

 cocks crow on all sides in the chilly dawns of early 

 April, and by the end of the month their mates are 

 brooding their richly-coloured eggs under shelter of 

 the bilberry and heather. By the same date the 

 Curlew has deposited her four pear-shaped eggs in a 

 saucer-shaped hollow of the damp soil near the spring 

 head, which is marked by yellow tufts of sedge and 

 soaking sponge-like cushions of the red and white bog 

 mosses. No moorland sound is so reminiscent of spring 

 as the long, rippling call-note of the curlew, commenced 

 as he takes wing and dying away in a regularly descend- 

 ing scale as he settles again after his flight. How 

 boldly, too, he drives off the carrion-crow, mounting 

 above him to get a good swoop, while the crow swerves 

 in clumsy attempt to avoid the onset. To the crow's 

 account must be laid these broken eggshells of creamy 

 white and flecks of scattered down where the Teals' 

 nest was snugly hidden in the deep heather. But 

 some nests escape, for later, upon the margin of one 

 of the lonely pools in the hills where the sandpiper 

 whistles upon the pebbly shore, we come upon a family 

 party, the mother teal shamming wounded in a 

 desperate attempt to cover the retreat of eight tiny 

 ducklings as they bravely breast the wavelets in her 

 wake. The soft rushy bogs surrounding these pools 

 are the nesting haunts of the Dunlin, which run 



