103 TEE ZOOLOGIST. 



among the upland fields, where Peewits scream around you, and 

 after burrowing down deeply through the high ground which 

 overlooks the village, joins that of the Afon Mawr, and the 

 united streams, rippling through the pebbles of the little beach, 

 are lost in the surf-beaten sand. This little valley presents a 

 great contrast to the wind-swept high ground on each side, and 

 harbours birds which you might think you left behind when you 

 penetrated the promontory by the high road which runs down 

 its backbone. But its green meadows are often broken with 

 bramble and other bushes, and its sides clothed with gorse and 

 bramble and bracken and some shrubs. And near the fine old 

 house and mill called " Bodwrdda " it is even wooded with low 

 trees, chiefly ash, big enough to have Green Woodpeckers' holes 

 in them, and for a Sparrow-Hawk to lay its eggs this year. One 

 afternoon I noticed no fewer than four Chiffchaffs in song about 

 the bushed sides of the valley. Linnets, Whitethroats, and 

 Yellow Buntings of course breed anywhere about the cliffs when 

 they are bushed ; and indeed one ivied cliff a little way up the 

 cwm of the Afon Saint, with some brambles at the foot, was 

 inhabited by a Chiffchaff. But up the valley you find Mistletoe 

 Thrushes (called here Caseg y Drychin = Mare of the bad 

 weather), Song-Thrushes, not numerous in the rest of that 

 neighbourhood, Spotted Flycatchers, Greenfinches, Sedge-War- 

 blers, and Wood-Pigeons. There are Moorhens, too, and I put 

 a bird off her seven eggs in the grassy bank at the edge of the 

 stream. Nest, properly speaking, there was none, merely a hole 

 in the ground very slightly lined. 



