Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/433

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birds seem to belong to all scenery alike; others love only the waste common land, the stream, or the sea-shore; while a third division, οἱ εκλετόι, are only to be found in one or two favoured counties in the whole of England. Of these last are the Ring-Ouzels. Dartmoor, the hills of Derbyshire, the Yorkshire Moors, are perhaps the best known of their summer haunts, but there is a little-known nook of Western Herefordshire to which they come with unfailing regularity. There they have entrenched themselves among the wild hills known in the Ordnance map as the Black Mountains; and there, in the May of this year, I journeyed with a friend whose love of birds at least equals, if I will not allow that it surpasses, my own, to see them at home.

The way to the dingle which the Ring-Ouzels love, took us first through a country—the country around the foot of these hills—which was curiously like some out-of-the-way corner of Brittany. The small rough fields, where gorse takes up much space from the poor grass; the small fields of hand-sown wheat; the tall hedges, sweet with bird-cherry, with pink crab trees, with yet sweeter may blossom; the brown babbling trout-stream running down the valley; the white rough homesteads; the small farms of so few acres, farmed by the holders with slow toil and antiquated methods, and not by hired labourers who must needs bring their work up to the perfection which he who pays for labour naturally requires:—all this had some unique foreign charm, and recalled another country, dwelt in, as this, by dark-haired Celts, who cling with a like dogged faith to their own inherited thoughts, methods of work, superstitions not a few.

The way to the hills leads through such a country as this, but when the mountains are reached civilization disappears, and spring too, although it is the latter end of May. In the sheltered