Birds -- Juvenile literature; Birds -- Nests -- Juvenile literature; Natural history -- Juvenile literature
And now, supposing that you are happily located for a few weeks in
summer, either in Scotland or Wales, let me repeat my constant advice
as regards the study and truest enjoyment of country life and things.
Go out for several hours; do not be in a hurry; take your book, or
your sketching, or whatever your favourite occupation may be, if it be
only a quiet one, and seat yourself by some rocky stream amongst the
mountains; choose the pleasantest place you know, where the sun can
reach you, if you need his warmth, and if you do not, where you can yet
witness the beautiful effects of light and shade. There seat yourself
quite at your ease, silent and still as though you were a piece of
rock itself, half screened by that lovely wild rose bush, or tangle of
bramble, and before long you will most likely see this merry, lively
little dipper come with his quick, jerking flight, now alighting on
this stone, now on that, peeping here, and peeping there, as quick as
light, and snapping up, now a water-beetle, now a tiny fish, and now
diving down into the stream for a worm that he espies below, or walking
into the shallows, and there flapping his wings, more for the sheer
delight of doing so than for anything else. Now he is off and away,
and, in a moment or two, he is on yonder gray mass of stone, which
rises up in that dark chasm of waters like a rock in a stormy sea,
with the rush and roar of the water full above him. Yet there he is
quite at home, flirting his little tail like a jenny wren, and hopping
about on his rocky point, as if he could not for the life of him be
still for a moment. Now listen! That is his song, and a merry little
song it is, just such a one as you would fancy coming out of his jocund
little heart; and, see now, he begins his antics. He must be a queer
little soul! If we could be little dippers like him, and understand
what his song and all his grimaces are about, we should not so often
find the time tedious for want of something to do.
We may be sure he is happy, and that he has, in the round of his small
experience, all that his heart desires. He has this lonely mountain
stream to hunt in, these leaping, chattering, laughing waters to bear
him company, all these fantastically heaped-up stones, brought hither
by furious winter torrents of long ago—that dashing, ever roaring,
ever foaming waterfall, in the spray of which the summer sunshine
weaves rainbows. All these wild roses and honeysuckles, all this maiden
hair, and this broad polypody, which grows golden in autumn, make up
his little kingdom, in the very heart of which, under a ledge of rock,
and within sound, almost within the spray of the waterfall, is built
the curious little nest, very like that of a wren, in which sits the
hen-bird, the little wife of the dipper, brooding with most unwearied
love on four or five white eggs, lightly touched with red.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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