and have often seen them lie crouched along the boughs, cowering so close that one day, going to sling a hammock, I nearly put my hand upon the bird. It slipped off the bough and, with a flight like a woodcock’s, sawing from right to left, it swooped under some gooseberry-bushes and vanished from sight. In the day-time, this power of sudden disappearance is the poor fern-owl’s chief protection from its persecutors, for, starting as if for long flight, it drops upon the ground with a single instantaneous movement, and where it drops there it lies quite motionless—and everybody overruns the spot. Its wonderfully beautiful colouring fortunately assimilates both with the bark of trees and the bare ground, and the cleverest of dogs will overshoot it without discovery. If flushed a second time, it as often as not flies back to the spot, or near it, where it was first startled. At night, when it is feeding, coursing up and down above the heather and the brackens, it has a beautiful flight, and should an owl suddenly drop over the birches and begin to beat their ground, the evolutions of the nightjars in silent protest are as exquisite as any sea-bird’s.
To July belongs the skylark, a bird really of all the year, but most intimately somehow the genius of the meadow. The hay has been cut, the first brood of young are flown, and the larks are again building, renewing the Spring with the aftermath of grass. The glorious growth of the meadow, spangled with ox-eye daisy and corn-flower, has been laid low, and the scented harvest has been carted, and the larks are busier than ever in the smooth-shorn field, while the sky seems never so full of their song as when the hay-makers are afield. The scythe and the terrible machine, and the tramp of feet behind them, are fatal to many a brood, but the majority escape, being on the wing, or, at any rate, running with their parents safely out of danger, by the time that the mowers come.
“And the glossy finches chatter
Up and down, up and down,
And the chaffinch idly sitteth
With her mate upon the sheaves,
And the wistful robin flitteth
Over beds of yellow leaves.”
“The Moorcock springs on whirring wings
Among the blooming heather.”
Burns.
August is, by sad right, the month of the grouse—a month of catastrophe, for it is then in the best of its health, enjoying the best of the moor and harvest, when the fateful Twelfth comes round; and after the day is over, horrid with perpetual guns,
“at the close of eve
She gathers in, mournful, her brood dispersed
By murderous sport, and o’er the remnant spreads
Fondly her wings.”
It is now, too, that the ptarmigan collect into large parties, and, forsaking the highlands, wander lower in search of more varied food: unwise in their generation, for in the higher altitudes they were comparatively safe from many of the perils that beset the grouse. True, when they were up among the clouds they were in the demesnes of the eagle, who thinned their company as they fed upon the shoots of heather and ling growing in tufts among the rocks or in broad patches down some sunny slope—
“Where the grouse lead their coveys
Thro’ the heather to feed.”
How silently and swiftly the birds of prey come wheeling round the curve of the cliff, and, skimming the ground, pick up and carry off one of a covey before even its companions can collect their wits to raise an alarm. So in India I have seen the laggar falcon take up a quail and pass on like some shadow, without disturbing the rest, as silent, literally, as the wind, and with an incredible speed. Yet to watch an eagle beating round the base of a hill there seems too much leisureliness for speed. But time its flight, and you will find that though the beats of its wings seem at long intervals it is really going by with great velocity. Its home, and its favourite watchtower, for birds of prey have always some one spot to which, when they wish to be idle, they find their way, is some lofty crag. There seated aloft, they overlook the lowlands where they find their food, without danger of molestation while in repose. For it is always up on the peaks, sometimes looking seaward over the nations of the sea-fowl, but generally inland, where, when the clouds leave it an unbroken prospect, it can sit, like some fierce old warden of the marches, to control the tribes of the valley. It feeds by choice upon lambs, on fawns and hares; so that, though the ptarmigan and grouse pay tribute, they are not harried by the eagle.
When they wander lower down the slopes the game-birds come within the earldom of the falcon, the peregrine, a terrible bird, as fierce as it is swift, and for ever ranging the moors in quest of food. I have known it, in India, chase its quarry right among the tents of the camp, kill it within a few feet of the tethered horses and their attendants, and carry off its prey before there was sense enough among the onlookers to snatch up a gun. When trained they are still as highly prized as of old in England, and at Dholpur I have seen it flown, from the hand, at both egret and duck, and marvelled, the last time as much as the first, at the terrific velocity of its swoop. It seems, too, as if the bird struck its prey with its beak, whereas it always strikes with its talons, striking and clutching almost simultaneously. The fearful impact breaks the quarry’s back, and enables the falcon, if it chooses, to continue its flight with the dead bird in its grasp, without coming to the ground at all.