de eae tab OoNe@ ae BAU Lal iT N 7 
tables on an outdoor terrace overlooking Derwent Water, and almost 
alighted on my shoulder one afternoon at Jordans, in the other end of the 
country in Buckinghamshire. The pied wagtail I first saw in the court- 
yard of Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. It was almost everywhere 
after that, tame and confiding. The martins added life and movement as 
one looked down from bridges, whether at the fresh water of the Tweed 
or the salt water of Menai Strait. A family was being energetically reared 
as late as September, under eaves on the main street of Ditchling, Sussex. 
I can testify that lapwings are “widely distributed.” The place they excited 
me most was near Penrith, when a large flock of these large, spectacular 
plovers flew erratically over the site of ancient Roman Brovacum, with the 
grand ruin of Brougham Castle just the other side. 
Then there were the single encounters — times when I saw one bird 
once, and never again. Scrambling up wooded Dunmallet at the foot of 
Ullswater, I saw that charming kinglet, the goldcrest. On a low outbuilding 
roof west of Bangor, Wales, a nuthatch (Britain has but one species) was 
eating crumbs early one morning. The spotted flycatcher at work over a 
Cambridge college garden ...a jewel-like little kingfisher on the Thames 
above London ...a red grouse whirring off over a Perthshire hillside... 
a great spotted woodpecker within the earthworks surrounding the strange 
monolith at Mayburgh near Eamont Bridge — these were memorable crea- 
tures tc encounter in memorable settings. 
There were episodes too. The newspapers have shown us pictures of 
tits stealing cream from bottles; I caught a coal tit in the act, before break- 
fast, in Menai Bridge. . . Walking near Tal-y-Cafn, Wales, I came upon 
a thrush’s anvil, with broken snail shells about as in Thorburn’s painting of 
the song thrush. But it was in Edinburgh cemetery that I saw the bird. . . 
On Puffin island, deserted by the puffins, but occupied by hundreds of pro- 
testing gulls, one strange note struck my ear, and seconds later an oyster- 
catcher flew past below the cliff’s edge. . . Early mornings, when the tide 
was out there were oyster-catchers and common sandpipers and quantities 
of curlews on the mud flats around Church island near Menai Bridge. Once 
a heron (Britain has but one species) was close in, fishing. Someone on 
the mainland of Anglesey moved in too near, and the curlews scattered, 
crying piercingly. 
I have not yet mentioned the great rakish gannets, flashing over the 
North Sea or the waterways of the Clyde — the little blue tits, brilliant 
and tiny, trickling through bushes — the long-tailed tit, unmistakable in 
flight — the black-backed gulls, everywhere on the Scottish coast — or 
such birds familiar in English literature as blackbirds, rooks, chaffinches. 
Was it a sky lark that flew overhead swiftly one evening at sunset on 
Blackford Hill, Edinburgh? It could have been. And what all the non- 
descript little creatures were that dived headlong into and over the hedge- 
rows of England I do not even venture to guess. 
It is no guess that even in mid-summer, in what Hudson called “the 
great silence that is August,” an American in Britain can see birds he 
never saw before, birds that he will gladly remember always. 
929 Brummel st., Evanston 
