Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/142

104 country name of "snake-bird" requires no further elucidation.

Or, in place of the orchards, let us visit the heath, where the gorse is now in its glory. Linnets, crimson-breasted cocks and plainer hens, twitter and sing amongst the golden blossom. Stonechats scold from their points of vantage on the topmost spikes. The Whinchat, always to be distinguished from the last by his buff breast and white eye-streak, is here also, but is equally at home in the hay meadows. Amongst the bare mounds of the warren the Wheatear flicks his white tail and dives into a deserted burrow, in some dark recess of which is his nest with the pale blue eggs. The wild outcry of the Lapwings is explained as we find their newly-hatched young crouching close to the ground. The frenzied "peewit" of the old bird is doubtless an exhortation to "lie low." Is it by accident that this youngster has squatted upon a lichen-covered stone which its mottled down exactly matches in colour? Meanwhile a Meadow Pipit is taking its short butterfly ascents, making the most by its industry of its feeble tinkle of a song. It sings both in ascending and descending, while the Tree Pipit rises silently from the bough of a hedge-row tree, reaches his highest point, and begins to sing only as he turns to come down, broad-arrow fashion, to his perch again. One has only to walk at random and a titlark (to give the meadow-pipit its familiar country name)