Category: Nature/Gardening/Animals
If life is, as some hold it to be, a vast melancholy ocean over which ships more or less sorrow-laden continually pass and ply, yet there lie here and there upon it isles of consolation on to which we may step out and for a time forget the winds and waves. One of these we may...
Birds are never more charming to watch than when they are building their nests, and, of all our British nest-builders, few, perhaps, build more charmingly than the blackbird. It...
7. CHAPTER VIII have referred once or twice before to the cormorant (including under this title the shag), and once to the guillemot. In this chapter I shall treat of both these birds a littl...
5. CHAPTER VThey breed together, or, more strictly speaking, conterminously, and more than half of the whole island--all that part where it is a peaty waste clothed with a thin brown heathe...
6. CHAPTER VIA pair of ravens on our island are also molested by the gulls, and when either of them flies from one point to another of the coast in their neighbourhood its path is marked by...
3. CHAPTER IIII have alluded to the aerial combats of the stock-dove during the nuptial season as elucidating similar movements on the part of the peewit, though I was not able so fully to sa...
9. CHAPTER IXI have called attention in the last chapter to that independent or self-reliant quality which so many birds possess, and by virtue of which they often act differently to their f...
4. CHAPTER IVThe wheatear is common over the warren-lands, and as I have been so fortunate as to witness for a whole afternoon, and very closely, a series of combined displays and combats on...
8. CHAPTER VIIIOne of the most interesting ways of watching birds at very close quarters is to conceal oneself in one of the corn-stacks or wheat-ricks that in the autumn begin to spring up li...
11. CHAPTER XIContinuing my journal, I will now give extracts which illustrate, principally, the return home of the rooks at night and their flying forth in the morning--those two aspects of...
1. CHAPTER IIf life is, as some hold it to be, a vast melancholy ocean over which ships more or less sorrow-laden continually pass and ply, yet there lie here and there upon it isles of con...
10. CHAPTER XIn this chapter I will give a few scenes from rook life, as I have watched it from late autumn to early spring, linking them together by a remark now and again of a general natu...
2. CHAPTER IIThe pretty little ring-plover (_Ægialitis kiaticola_) belongs properly to the sea-shore, but he haunts and breeds inland also, and is especially the companion of the stone-curle...