Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/246

172 to contest this view, for, when its nest is threatened, the buzzard will sometimes swoop at the intruder with great spirit. A friend of ours while climbing in a particularly awkward spot upon a Welsh cliff was thus "held up" for at least an hour by an angry buzzard. Another, in the Lake District, pushed the attack so closely that its wing was broken by a blow from a stick, showing lack of discretion perhaps but certainly not of valour.

Between mountain and moor comes a fringe of copse where every bank is carpeted with the delicate fronds of beech and oak-fern, and where in wet spots the stately osmunda rears its five foot fronds and golden spore heads. This, rather than the open moor, is the haunt of the Black Game, and here we may chance to put up a noble black-cock which goes off as if with no intention of stopping short of the next county. Would that we could be present at one of those gatherings in the frosty dawn of a March morning when the black-cocks strut and spread their tails and spar at one another and scuffle for the edification of the assembled grey-hens. But the black-grouse is far from being such a favourite as its kinsman of the moors,—a bird which the true sportsman regards with patriotic pride, for the Red Grouse is supposed to be the only one of our native birds which is entirely confined to Britain. The more general view, however, is to look upon it as an island race of the Willow Grouse, so widely diffused in