Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/166

120 all kinds of confidential twitterings which are discarded as soon as the fledglings can shift for themselves. This family life which seems to show birds at their best, involving, as it does, so much care and watchfulness on behalf of their young, is only a fleeting phase, for the family is soon merged in the flock, but while it lasts it gives us many a pleasing picture, e.g., of a whole family of tits in fluffy and engaging infancy perched side by side upon a branch, or of the cock chaffinch, spick and span, hopping up to place a grub in the wide-open mouth of one of his hopeful fledglings whose quivering wings and impatient cries tell of its eager expectancy, or again of the flycatcher, which in an aerial excursion has just made prize of a "longlegs" with an audible snap of his bill, carrying his booty to the young bird, more mealy in plumage than himself, perched on a croquet-hoop or on the edge of the tennis-net. What a twittering and trilling and scolding there is where the education of young linnets is proceeding amongst the gorse, while in the hay meadows whinchats, perched on the taller heads of cow-parsnip, with slowly dipping tails and sharp note of "u-tick" warn their young to keep down amongst the long grasses. What prettier sight than to see the swallow poise on fluttering pinions for a moment to feed a young bird on the wing, or hover to fill each gaping bill of its young family perched side by side on the telegraph-wire.