With them, on these retaliatory sallies, goes that most intrepid of sea-fowl, the skua--one of the many birds that the sailor calls "molly-hawks," and that the lesser creatures dread like a bird of prey. For such it really is, living chiefly upon the fish the other birds have caught, upon the birds themselves, and during the nesting season upon the eggs and young of all species indiscriminately: so reckless in attack that nothing on wings dares to oppose it, and so powerful that full-grown gulls, if they persist in the fight, succumb to it. He laughs the sea-eagle to scorn, challenging it by loud squalls to a duel. But the erne knows better than to join in a conflict from which neither honour nor profit can come, and spreading his great square-cut wings to the breeze, drifts swiftly away from the spot over the moorland that the skua calls its own. Where the herring-fishers are at work, there the skua is sure to be, gobbling as much as it can find for itself, and chasing all the other birds to make them drop their shares. Nor when there are eggs in its nest does the skua hesitate to threaten human beings that approach it, and indeed actually to attack them; while there are few dogs, if any, that have ever encountered an angry skua, and had experience of its sharp beak and battering wings, that care to face the fierce fowl a second time. CHAPTER VII THE KINGFISHER--THE MYSTERY AND FOLK-LORE OF THE HALCYON--THE WATER-VOLE AT HOME--IN THE WATER-MEADOWS--THE MOORHEN AND ITS HAUNTS--THE REED-WARBLER--THE SEDGE-WARBLER--MUSIC OF THE SUMMER NIGHTS--WAKING THE SUN CHAPTER VII "_The long-leaved willow, on whose bending spray,_ _The py'd Kingfisher, having got his prey,_ _Sate with the small breath of the water shaken,_ _Till he devoured the fish that he had taken._" So writes Michael Drayton in the sixteenth century, and how true an observer of Nature the old poet was is proved by the words of our latest ornithologist: "It alights on some twig bending over the stream, its weight causing it to swing gently to and fro, whence it scans the young trout sporting in the pool below, and suddenly it will drop into the water, and almost before the spectator is aware of the fact, is back again on its perch with a struggling fish in its beak." Nor must the meaning of Drayton's "py'd" be mistaken, for in his day, and indeed much later, anything of more than one colour was called pied, so long as gaiety of tint was the result of the combination. So Shakespeare calls the daisy "pied," and Ben Jonson the rainbow. But to come back to our kingfisher, "famousèd for [Illustration: THE KING OF THE POOL]