for some time upright and perfectly still, makes a sudden and very swingy bob forward with the head, the tail at the same time swinging up, just in the way that a wooden bird performs these actions upon one's pulling a string. This again seems to have no special reference to anything, unless it be deportment.
All at once a bird makes a swift run forward, not one of those short little dainty runs—one and then another and another, with little start-stops between—that one knows so well, but a long, steady run down upon something, and at the same moment the glasses—if one is lucky and the distance not too great—reveal the object which has occasioned this, a delicate white thing floating in the air which one takes to be a thistle-down. This is secured and eaten, and we may imagine that the bird's peckings at it after it is in his possession are to disengage the seed from the down. But all at once—before you have had time to set down the glasses and make the note that the great plover (Œdicnemus Crepitans)[1] will snap at a wandering thistle-down, and having separated the delicate little seed-sails from the seed, eat the latter, etc., etc.—a small brown moth comes into view flying low over a belt of dry bushy grass that helps, with the bracken, to edge the sandy warren, for these wastes are given over to rabbits and large landowners, and are marked "warrens" on the map. Instantly the same bird (who seems to catch sight of the moth just as you do) starts in pursuit with the same rapid run and head stretched eagerly out. He gets up to the moth and essays to catch it, pecking at it in a very peculiar way, not excitedly or wildly, but with little precise pecks, the head closely and guardedly following the moth's
- ↑ Burhinus oedicnemus as it is called nowadays (Wikisource ed.).
