Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/153

Rh waxen blossoms and the wood sorrel, with its delicately-veined flowers, clothe every ledge. The whitebreasted Dipper will fly before us with sharp "zit, zit," or stand on a stone bowing to its reflection in the water, while sprightly Grey Wagtails, surely the most graceful of a graceful family, and full of life as the waters of the infant river, fly from stone to stone amongst the eddies and spray at the foot of the fall. The male has the full black throat and the special call-note "twee, twee" of the breeding season. Birch and rowan (how preferable is the old North Country name to "mountain ash") now begin to clothe the sides of the little dale, furnishing nesting holes to many a pair of Redstarts and Pied Flycatchers. Many a May morning here sees a keen white frost and, when such an one falls late in the month, we have seen the opening fern-fronds and the young shoots of ash and oak hang black and dead. A Raven passes with hoarse croak, and from far up in the blue comes the wild mewing cry of a soaring Buzzard. Its mate sweeps out from the ivied crag to join it. Stunted trees cling to the face of the cliff and, supported by one of these, is the nest, nearly a yard across, built of smaller sticks than that of the raven, lined with tufts of moor-grass torn up by the roots and garnished round the edge of the cup with fresh leafy twigs of birch. As we climb to it, the cries of the birds become more angry than plaintive, and their lazy floating is exchanged