eir young in the meadow near the river.
His curious behaviour interested me so much that I stood and watched him
for half an hour or longer. It was a hot, windless day, and the bird
was by himself among the tall flowering grasses and buttercups of the
meadow--a queer gaunt unfinished hobbledehoy-looking fowl with a head
much too big for his body, a beak that resembled a huge nose, and a
very monstrous mouth. When I first noticed him he was amusing himself by
picking off the small insects from the flowers with his big beak, a most
unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so delicate a task. At the
same time he was hungering for more substantial fare, and every time a
rook flew by over him on its way to or from a neighbouring too populous
rookery, the young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit
his harsh, throaty hunger-call. The rook gone, he would drop once
more into his study of the buttercups, to pick from them whatever
unconsidered trifle in the way of provender he could find. Once a small
bird, a pied wagtail, flew near him, and he begged from it just as he
had done from the rooks: the little creature would have run the risk
of being itself swallowed had it attempted to deliver a packet of flies
into that cavernous mouth. I went nearer, moving cautiously, until I was
within about four yards of him, when, half turning, he opened his mouth
and squawked, actually asking me to feed him; then, growing suspicious,
he hopped awkwardly away in the grass. Eventually he permitted a nearer
approach, and slowly stooping I was just on the point of stroking his
back when, suddenly becoming alarmed, he swung himself into the air and
flapped laboriously off to a low hawthorn, twenty or thirty yards away,
into which he tumbled pell-mell like a bundle of old black rags.

Then I left him and thought no more about the crows except that
their young have a good deal to learn upon first coming forth into an
unfriendly world. But there was a second nest and family close by all
the time. A day or two later I discovered it accidentally in a very
curious way.

There was one spot where I was accustomed to linger for a few minutes,
sometimes for half an hour or so, during my daily walks. Here at the
foot of the low bank on the treeless side of the stream there was a
scanty patch of sedges, a most exposed and unsuitable place for any bird
to breed in, yet a venturesome moorhen had her nest there and was now
sitting on seven e