Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/151

Rh cliffs tenanted by a multitude of sea-fowl. Still it would not be difficult to find a bold escarpment from which, as one nears it, the fierce falcon dashes out, with clamorous outcry, from the overhung ledge where, in the dry earth, she has scraped out a hollow amongst the grass tufts for her big red eggs. She sweeps round in great circles, cleaving the air with swift, clean strokes, then settles on a rocky pinnacle, where the glass shows her black moustaches and the wavy lines on her breast. Meanwhile, her mate, the tiercel, smaller and with shriller cry, is on the wing, tilting at the ravens which have a nest further along the same line of cliffs. Sometimes it comes to actual blows and the black feathers have been seen to fly freely. Happily a sentiment is spreading in favour of such picturesque bandits as the falcon, a feeling that they are beautiful in themselves and that their presence adds interest to their wild and desolate haunts. Thanks to the grace thus afforded, we may still in a few localities, watch the fork-tailed Kite circling high in the air above remote Welsh woodlands, as it did some centuries since above the metropolis, when it was the scavenger of London streets. The same sentiment has come to the rescue of the Golden Eagle, which, once nearly extinct in Scotland, is again fairly numerous in the Highlands.

But our list of moorland birds is far from complete. The Ring Ouzel shows his white gorget where blocks