Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/244

170 Wren. This is a fact which the bird books do not appear to notice when they write its biography, but certain it is that in lonely corrie or amidst a chaos of tumbled boulders the song of the wren rings out—sole voice of living thing—as cheerily as in lane and thicket. Our sizeable wild animals are now so few that one is glad to hear of red-deer lingering in the Martindale fells, and of the marten-cat still finding a home in the wilder recesses of Borrowdale. The fox ranges high into the hills; we have seen it loping leisurely across a ridge close to the summit of Snowdon.

Yet another bird of the mountain tops remains to be mentioned,—not the ptarmigan which at the present day is not found south of the border,—but the Dotterel, if indeed this choice and dainty little plover still breeds upon the Lake District mountains, where twenty years ago its numbers had almost reached the vanishing point. For, esteemed by the epicure, its feathers were still more coveted by the trout-fisher for the manufacture of artificial flies. An old shepherd tells us that the birds fetched 3s. 6d. each,—small wonder that they vanished. It is useless to look for the dotterel except upon the mountain summits, the land of grey mists, where there is a loose shale underfoot, or in places a dark, woolly, alpine moss. Here, if fortune favours, the bird may start up close before us with a weak, plover note, or run tamely over the patches of stones, stopping from time to