Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/242

168 "ghylls" or "cloughs" to whose rocky sides clings a fringe of birch or rowan, the red berries of the latter being as attractive to them as to their cousins the mistle-thrushes. Below the edge of the moor the Twites or Mountain Linnets flock to the crofter's weedy patch of oat stubble, now gay with charlock and corn-marigold. A single plaintive call from a neighbouring fallow draws attention to a Golden Plover; as it runs to take wing a whole flock of its fellows, previously unseen, starts up to bear it company.

The Green Woodpecker often wanders out into the open, miles away from trees, in search of ants' nests upon the warm moorland slopes. Of small birds the Meadow Pipit and Wheatear are perhaps most characteristic of the high sheep-walks and mountain moorlands. Every rocky "kopje" has its pair of wheatears. They delight in the tumbled blocks of millstone grit which overlook the Derbyshire moors, or in such a craggy citadel as that which forms the summit of Glyder Fach, where thirty-foot slabs, tossed at random, suggest a dozen ruined Stonehenges. Toilsome is the pull up, but, the cairn once gained, we breathe enchanted air, serene and fair, while evening shafts of light stream from Tryfan's crest and the mountains, of a deep neutral grey, float in a setting of rosy haze. As we scramble, we disturb a family party of Ravens. With rapid flights to ledge and brow, excited croaks and growling bark, the old birds muster and draw