“There have I watched the downy Coot
Pacing with safe and steady foot,
The surface of the floating field,
And though the elastic floor might yield
In chinks, and let the water flow
In beads of crystal from below,
Yet was the tremulous region true
To that rough traveller passing through.”
Faber.
Above all, there was the moorhen, a bird that one can surely never be tired of watching, it is so full of quips and cranks. It has a little red wafer on its nose and queer little patches of white under its tail, which it keeps on flicking as it goes in a comical automatic sort of way, in time with its steps, as if its tail were a kind of pedometer measuring off the distances it walks. And when it is in the water swimming, it jerks its head backwards and forwards, as if doing so helped it along and it could not help jerking every time it kicked out its legs. And when it is in the water, how it bobs about! You can never depend upon it for an instant, going in the direction it started for; something or other is sure to attract its attention, especially if it has its brood behind it, and its mate is on the watch, making a great show of vigilance and unnecessary sagacity.
The young ones—trying to follow the mother’s movements as she darts at a fly here, pecks at something there, suddenly stands on her head to fetch something up from down below, or makes an unexpected dash at an insect that is skimming across to the reeds—twist and wind about and get in each other’s way, like a squad of badly-managed boats, that keep on fouling and ramming one another, and all the time keep up a feeble little chorus of disconsolate cheep-cheep. But they are learning their lessons all the time, and it is delightful to watch their imitations. They gape at the passing flies, make sudden little excursions, three inches at a time, after something they think they see, and ridiculously attempt to dive, as they notice their mother do. But they are so light and so weak that the resistance of the water is too much for them, and all they can do is to put their heads under water and kick in the air with their legs, exactly like little boys trying to turn somersaults on the grass, but only getting half over.
Indeed, whatever the moorhens are doing, they are interesting, and there is an alert sprightliness about them when in company that is infinitely amusing. When an old bird is alone (it is impossible to tell cock from hen) it is very self-respecting and purposeful. As it goes upon the grass there is a high-stepping, aristocratic gait about its walk that even the affected little flirt of the tail accentuates, and when he is in the water, with some object-point in view, he swims both fast and straight. And what beautiful homes they find, where the yellow iris grows, and the marsh-marigold, and tangles of forget-me-not, where the stream filters in the shallows through beds of cress, or deepens into pools, so that the water-lily may spread its pads at ease. And there are beds of bulrush and feathery-headed reeds, into which they paddle; and if you do not mind wet feet, you can go and look right along the little “pleached” alleys they have made for themselves, to the end where the nest, a heap of rushes with a comfortable hollow smooth-lined with finer material, closes the passage. No bird nests more becomingly than the moorhen, or more picturesquely; and if it were not that I remembered the enjoyment I used to find in wading after them, and (with some shame be it said) the excellence of the eggs when hard-boiled cold, I should look back with more repentance than I do to the wholesale manner in which I used to fill my handkerchief full of the large speckled eggs, and triumphantly distribute them along the table at tea-time. Alas! for Clare’s supposition that
“At distance from the water’s edge
Or hanging sallow’s farthest stretch
The moorhen builds her nest of sedge
Safe from destroying schoolboy’s reach.”