Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/159

 YSTER-CATCHERS in hundreds—many thousands altogether—each with orange bill tucked in its scapulars, snoozed or pretended to snooze on the frozen tide margin. Though really conspicuously pied—"seapies" the fishermen call them—they appeared black; the white under parts were lost against the white background. Common gulls flapped idly down the estuary or drifted, tail foremost, on the flow. "Grey-duck" (the Solway name) came up with the tide, and with them white call-ducks, birds which, for the time, had thrown over restraint of domesticity on some frozen inland pool to seek the open life of the estuary. Curlews wailed across the frozen flats; cormorants, with solemn, purposeful flight, passed up ahead of the tide, flying close to the water.

Bare hedgerow and tree, and the green grass in the fields, were white with hoar-frost; even the sheep-cropped marsh pastures glistened with rime; everything was transformed with fairy decorations. The stiff upstanding stems of last summer's nettles, the withered seedless knapweed heads, the wilted nipplewort, and the untidy willow-herb, still flaunting tattered white awns, each had its edges and borders bedecked with diamonds. On the marsh itself, where the ditches cut deep into the sticky soil, water still flowed; snipe and wideawake redshank probed in the only soft mud to be found, wading recklessly in the shallow trickle close to the road. Titlarks had found these food-supplying spots, and blackbirds rattled their alarm cry as they rose from the depth at our