CHAPTER VII
The Kingfisher—The Mystery and Folk-Lore of the Halcyon—The Water-Vole at Home—In the Water-Meadows—The Moorhen and its Haunts—The Reed-warbler—The Sedge-Warbler—Music of the Summer Nights—Waking the Sun
CHAPTER VII
“The long-leaved willow, on whose bending spray,
The py’d Kingfisher, having got his prey,
Sate with the small breath of the water shaken,
Till he devoured the fish that he had taken.”
SO writes Michael Drayton in the sixteenth century, and how true an observer of Nature the old poet was is proved by the words of our latest ornithologist: “It alights on some twig bending over the stream, its weight causing it to swing gently to and fro, whence it scans the young trout sporting in the pool below, and suddenly it will drop into the water, and almost before the spectator is aware of the fact, is back again on its perch with a struggling fish in its beak.” Nor must the meaning of Drayton’s “py’d” be mistaken, for in his day, and indeed much later, anything of more than one colour was called pied, so long as gaiety of tint was the result of the combination. So Shakespeare calls the daisy “pied,” and Ben Jonson the rainbow.