Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/94

64 stone curlew lingers, astonishing the shooter who adds to his bag one of these big-eyed plovers. But there is another winterer whose habits, though more regular, are more surprising. All along those southern shores, frequenting the rock faces, the bramble scrub, and promenades were black redstarts; whence come they, these continental nesters, and why? The common redstart which nests with us, and in Scandinavia up to the North Cape, spends the colder months in Africa; this darker bird, whose breeding area extends from the Baltic to the Mediterranean shores, comes west for choice; possibly, if it travels from Spain, actually comes north. How the little dusky males flicked their fiery tails as they clung to the rocks, hunting for spiders or insects in every crack and cranny; they flitted amongst the bushes which fill the deep valleys where tiny streams have carved their way towards the shore; they perched on the backs of seats on the sea-front at Seaton. Travellers from Germany find their way to the Lancashire coast, and annually visit the western Welsh headlands, but we have still to learn the nesting area of the particular birds which come each winter to the Cornish and Devon shores.

In those Devon lanes, deep narrow ways, some of them, with high banks and thick hedgerows meeting overhead, tunnels from which the feathery awns of old man's beard still hung in grey masses, and where the hazel catkins were thick and green, abundant lamb's tails, tits worked in busy flocks. The long-tails shot from hedge to hedge with high-pitched calls, the blue tits chimed, the greats and coals sounded their vernal up-and-down challenges. There, too, the nuthatch whistled like any schoolboy, and hammered with its pick bill as it ran up and down the trunks, often descending head foremost. Primroses and violets were in abundance, speedwell and avens weeks before their usual time further north, and even the