Stray herons, too, come to the trees to roost. The great bird could be seen far off, battling with the wind, rising and falling, blown to this side and that, now displaying his pale under-surface, and now the slaty blue of his broad, slow-flapping wings.
As the sun sank nearer to the horizon, the tall trunks would catch the level beams and shine like fiery pillars, and the roof thus upheld would look darker and gloomier by contrast. With the passing of that red light, the lively bird-notes would cease, the trees would give forth a more solemn, sea-like sound, and the day would end.
My days, during all the time I spent at Wolmer, when I had given up asking questions, and my poor old woman had ceased cudgelling her brains for lost memories, were spent with the birds. The yaffle, { 212} nightjar, and turtle-dove were the most characteristic species. Wolmer is indeed the metropolis of the turtle-doves, even as Savernake is (or was) that of the jays and jackdaws. All day long the woods were full of the low, pleasing sound of their cooing: as one walked among the pines they constantly rose up in small flocks from the ground with noisy wines and as they flew out into some open space to vanish again in the dark foliage, their wings in the strong sunlight often looked white as silver. But the only native species I wish to speak of is the teal as I found it a little over five years ago. In Wolmer these pretty entertaining little ducks have bred uninterruptedly for centuries, but I greatly fear that the changes now in progress--the increase of the population, building, the large number of troops kept close by, and perhaps, too, the slow drying up of the marshy pools--will cause them to forsake their ancient haunts.
By chance I very soon discovered their choicest breeding-place, not far from that dome-shaped, fir-crowned hill which was my principal landmark. This was a boggy place, thirty or forty acres in extent surrounded by trees and overgrown with marsh weeds and grasses, and in places with rushes. Cotton grass grew in the drier parts, and the tufts nodding in the wind looked at a distance like silvery white flowers. At one end of the marsh there were clumps of willow and alder, where the reed-bunting was breeding and the grasshopper warbler uttered his continuous whirring sound, which seemed to accord { 213} with the singing of the wind in the pines. At the other end there was open water with patches of rushes growing in it; and here at the water's edge, shaded by a small fir, I composed myself on a bed of heather to watch the birds.