A Partridge's Nest
In spite of such capricious experience, I did not expect to find a partridge's nest at the end of last month bn the edge of my potato- ground in the kitchen-garden adjacent to the orchard. The nest of breast- feathers (whether moultings or not it was impossible to tell) held in place by a swathing of bents was ornamented rather than concealed by a few nodding plumes of flowering grasses. But neither bird nor nest was decipherable to the eye until the bird flew to escape my stepping on her. There were only nine olive-brown eggs, half or less the customary number. When I called next day, she appeared to be not at home, for I could see nothing but nondescript clods and shaven grass. I bent right down over the site and suddenly she sprang into view but motion- less as one of the clods. I had half a mind to stroke her slaty grey back with its palette-knife streaks, dashes and vermiculations of chestnut, buff and black, as a week or so before I had stroked the back of a hen chaffinch nesting in a clematis climbing the fruit-shed. I forbore, and next morning there were only broken shells. But the whole party was scudding about the potato ground. The cock sheared the hedge, but the hen advanced on the trespasser with depressed wings and stiffened quills like a displaying turkey. Then, reversing both her intention and direction, she exchanged defiance for her own variation of the broken- wing act in retreat but preserving the same truculent pose. I left her, for where could the family have enjoyed a better dusting-bath than on a fallow potato-pitch?
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