26 
PICTURES OF BIRD LIFE. 
Derbyshire, but is known at Scarborough, and so high as the East and West 
Lothians. A straggler or two only have been found in Ireland. It is eminently 
a bird of the great reed-beds which form so conspicuous a feature in much of 
the scenery of the eastern counties, and were still more predominant before the 
drainage operations of the present century. 
“ O’er the illimitable reed, 
And many a glancing plash and sallovvy isle. 
The wide-wing’d sunset of the misty marsh 
Glares ” * 
on the little brown bird and its nest. Thus it is often known as the Reed Bird or 
Reed Wren. It may have been the bird which Keats had in his mind when he 
wrote— 
“ The sedge has withered from the lake, 
And no birds sing.” 
It is somewhat curious that the Laureate, with his fondness for marshland scenery 
and life, does not introduce it specially into his poetry. Mariana might well have 
listened to its song when 
“ Upon the middle of the night, 
Waking, she heard the night-fowl crow; 
The cock sang out an hour ere light; 
From the dark fen the oxen’s low 
Came to her,” 
for these are precisely the sounds which Mr. Stevenson, who has given so excellent 
an account of the Reed Warbler, heard when he spent that summer night on Sul- 
kingham Broad of which he has written so charmingly,! till 
“ Cold winds woke the grey-eyed morn.” 
This bird is occasionally found far from reeds, and even water, in thickets; but both 
by its song and its nest it loves to identify itself with them. Some who are 
strangers to the fenland scenery of East Anglia may fancy its reed-beds monotonous 
both in colour and vegetation. We cannot better describe them for such persons as 
they are seen in the Broads of Norfolk and form the peculiar haunt of the Reed 
Warbler than by quoting a description which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for 
December, 1879. “On either side of the river and round the Broads is a dense wall 
of emerald reeds from seven to ten feet in height. Then come the yellow iris 
flowers, tall and bending rushes and bulrushes, the sweet sedge with its curious 
* “The Last Tournament.” 
t See Stevenson’s “Birds of Norfolk,” Vol. I., p. 121. 
