Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/289

Rh Such scenes can the Forest show to the ornithologist in spring and summer, nor is it less interesting to him in the winter. Here, as he wanders across some moor, flocks of fieldfares and missel-thrushes start out of the hollies, and the ring-ousel skulks off from the yew. A bittern, its neck encircled with a brown frill of feathers, is, perhaps, wading by the stream; and hark! from out of the sky comes the clanging of a wedge-shaped flock of grey-lag geese.

Instead of a chapter a volume might be written upon the ornithology of the New Forest, especially about the winter visitants—the flocks of pochards, and teal, and tufted-ducks, which darken the Avon, and the swans and geese which whiten the Solent. I have stood for hours on the beach at Calshot, and watched the faint cloud in the horizon gradually change into a mass of wings beating with one stroke, or marked string after string of wigeon come splashing down in the mid-channel. Little flocks of ring-dotterels and dunlins flit overhead, their white breasts flashing in the winter sun every time they wheeled round. The shag flies heavily along, close to the water, with his long outstretched neck, melancholy and slow, and the cry of the kittiwake sounds from the mud-flats.

To leave, however, the winter birds, and to pass on to more general observations, let me notice a curious fact about the tree-creeper (Certhia familiaris) in the southern parts of the Forest, Here there are large plantations of firs, and consequently but few holes in the trees. To make up for this deficiency, I have twice found the creeper's nest placed inside a squirrel's "cage," showing the same adaptability to circumstances which is met with in the whole animal creation. Here, too, in these thick firs build great numbers of jays; and I have, when climbing up to their nests, more than once seen 271