Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/130

94 ; an incautious step and we were floundering in brown peat water and very black mud. In the overhanging clumps the yellow-billed twite, the "heather lintie," made its nest, often using the feathery cotton-grass for a cosy lining; from the oozy mud the snipe rose, dodging and calling; more rarely we disturbed the curlew and heard its plaintive whistle. Doubtless it too nested there, though we never found the nest or the crouching, short-billed young.

Cranberry and bilberry varied the monotony of ling and heather, for both heaths were plentiful; lush tracts were white with the waving flags of cotton-grass. Sundews, three species, took toll of the countless flies which buzzed over the moor and alighted on their sticky, deceitful leaves; marsh andromeda was there, and a few fine clumps of royal fern. Crowberry, often confused with heather, was abundant, as it is on the upland moms. When we disturbed the hare from its form its powerful hind-legs threw up showers of glistening drops as it dodged between the tussocks. We chased and caught the heath moths and the Manchester treble-bar, whose caterpillar devoured the cranberry; we brought away scores of the hairy larvæ of the oak-eggar and lost them at home, finding starved unfortunates spinning in out-of-the-way corners where the domestic brush had failed to reach them. The big, green, gold-spangled grub of the emperor moth was a special treasure; we liked to watch it spin its flask-shaped cocoon, and to examine the bottle-neck with its hair-like stopper: no ichneumon can enter, but the emerging moth can easily push its outward way. Beautiful insects were these eyed moths, the males smaller but far richer in colour than the grey females; often, too often, a dipterous parasite, a large fly, appeared in our breeding cases instead of the much prized moth.

Lizards, though not rare, were elusive; when we saw