Watching Birds at a Straw-Stack
One of the most interesting ways of watching birds at very close quarters is to conceal oneself in one of the corn-stacks or wheat-ricks that in the autumn begin to spring up like mushrooms all over the country-side. This is a winter pastime, and the harder the weather the greater will be the results yielded. To have chaffinches, greenfinches, bramblings, tree-sparrows, buntings, yellow hammers, blue-tits, starlings, perhaps a blackbird or two, pheasants and partridges, all about one and quite near, one should choose a bitterly cold day with a biting wind driving the snowflakes before it, and the snow itself whitening the landscape, but not so deeply as to cover things beyond a bird's power of scratching. Rising early, one gets to the stack whilst it is still dark. At one side there is always a great heap of refuse material of the stack, threshed ears of corn, chopped and winnowed straw, as well as—at least where picturesque farming prevails (and may it long prevail)—
