Bird Life Glimpses

One evening in June 1901--the 6th, to be precise--I was walking near Tuddenham, where a big lane crosses a little stream by a rustic bridge, and stopped to lean against the pali...

The Lark, which is our river here, and more particularly the little stream that runs into it, are, like most rivers and streams in England, much haunted by moorhens and dabchick...

There is a heronry on an estate here, into which, in the early spring, I have sometimes crept, coming before dawn, in silence and darkness, to be there when it awoke. What an aw...

Starlings are not birds to make part of an _olla podrida_ merely--as in my last chapter--so I shall devote this one to them, more or less entirely. I will begin with a defence o...

Peewits, besides those aerial antics which are of love, or appertaining to love, have some other and very strange ones, of the same nature, which they go through with on the gro...

Tits, as I think I have said, or implied, are a feature of Icklingham. They like the fir plantations, which, though of no great dimensions--for they only make a patch here and t...

One bird there is to whom these scattered fir plantations, with their surrounding, sandy territory, dotted here and there with a gaunt elder-bush or gnarled old hawthorn, are ex...

Another bird, very characteristic, whilst it stays, of the steppes of Icklingham, is the wheat-ear. A blithe day it is when the first pair arrive, in splendid plumage always--th...

Shakespeare’s “guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlet,” makes “his pendent bed and procreant cradle,” year after year, on the flint walls of my house in Icklingham, thus o...

The hooded crow is common in this part of the country, during the winter; to the extent, indeed, of being quite a feature of it. With the country people he is the carrion crow m...

Icklingham, in and about which most of the observations contained in the following pages have been made, is a little village of West Suffolk, situated on the northern bank of th...

It was on a 13th of April, that, having spent some hours in the woods, to no purpose, I at length climbed the hill, up which they ran, and came out upon a smooth slope of turf,...