FEBRUARY ON AN ESSEX ESTUARY.
TN the level sunshine of mid-February the distances over the saltmarsh change and deceive. The low light of early morning lifts to a mellow radiance which dims edges and sets angles in a haze. The long slope of ploughland above the marsh stretches an acreage not to be guessed as you would guess it in sharper sunlight; the furrows recede into vaporous, immeasurable planes in which vision wanders and fails. On the millings and over the estuary water the same mist of light fuses outlines and draws distance nearer. A solitary redshank flits up the river-bank, and, except for the faster wing-beat, you might doubt whether it was not a curlew. High on the furthest horizon the grey tower of a church rises above red tiles and the masts of ocean-going yachts ; the map sets the little town three miles away, but in that strange lustre her tower lifts beyond a single field, her masts must be only at the turn of the river. A tiny farm, with its stacks and barns dotted about a hill on the far bank, lies in a plane neither near nor far; the yellow rays illumine the straw
thatch and light jewels in the low windows; the whole group colours like a picture hung unframed in open air. In the farthest distance of all, out towards the sea, the horizon is a thin strip of grey. A narrowing spit of pasture-laud runs, into the breadth of sea-water, and along it stand grey trees; there is an air about them of something exotic, as if they were palm-trees onithe horizon of a desert.
The moving water of the estuary is the fascinating thing. A high spring-tide will flood broad miles of millings; the whole flat valley is a sheet of water. But other, lesser tides set in motion currents of a life which belongs to and is ruled by the rise and fall of the water ; the whole estuary pulses with the movement of runnels and channels and pools of water, and the flocks of wading, mud-haunting birds that follow the moving levels and the unbaring of the silted spaces where they feed. The estuary is never still; its brimrainge aud emptyinge, its drainings and saturatings, its flooding and drying, are instinct with a purpose that even adds to the resistless, implacable tide a sense of personality, a spirit of conscious doing. To watch the broad river rise higher and higher on the flood-tide, and send the reviving strength of water pushing up each seam and cavity of its broad banks, is to see something of absolute power, of unstayed, unstaying will, a huge energy of fulfilling. But the ebbing tide brings a still more insistent sense of purpose and plan. Only one who knows the millings well can walk to points he may have chosen from the sea-wall at the edge, for though the ground looks firm enough from a distance, it is so out and intersected by passages and ditches, and the streams seen close at hand are so much broader than they looked to be fifty yards away, that an unskilled wanderer may easily find himself in something like a maze of muddy slopes and impassable channels. In the soundest aud hardest bank, too, there are concealed holes in the shaggy grass and weed which are unnerving to the ignorant ; the sudden step into nothing jerks with the vicious- ness of a trap. That is the violence of surprise; but there is something much fuller of terror in the slow, penetrating knowledge of the strength of pouring water. In most of the channels you will see the stream ebbing gently enough ; a current running transparent over flat aisles of mud where you may count the footmarks of a dozen different birds ; the webbed feet of gulls have set their print next the lighter track of the waders, and here and there, criss-crossed among the trails of the true estuary birds, a cock pheasant has set his heavy monograms deep on the soft floor. About the sides of those quieter channels stand the stalks of last year's flowers, and the water, slowly subsiding, has hung the film of bubbles between stalk and stalk, like tiny talc windows; you touch the film, and the window vanishes into a streak of elemental slime. Those are the tamer, more tranquil channels of the millings. The wilder, crueller places are the breaches in an old, forsaken sea-wall that pens the flood-water as in a
lake; then, when the lake has to empty, it may pour out only by the breaches, which are filled with a tumbling stream of tremendous weight and volume. The water roars into the lower, outer channel; a man slipping into that bellying wave would be rolled over like a bottle. It is the strongest sense of personal power of all ; and as you watch the purposeful outrush of the tide, something sinking in a hidden hole at your side tells of air forced into underground hollows; the marsh about you sucks and coughs.
February is the month to watch the bird life of the millings. The rigours of December and January may people the mud- flats with a fuller concourse of migrating shore birds and birds that must come to water wherever they can find it; ice and snow may bring the geese from the black North, and fill the gunner's punt with widgeon ; but February is the month that others than the gunner would choose. In February the birds of the estuary are not yet paired for nesting, and they still move and manceuvre in flocks, following the falling and the rising tides, and waiting for the uncovering of bay and flat and islet of mud,—true limicolae, mud-haunters, as the Latin names them. In February, too, the flocks move in brighter sunshine, under warmer skies; you may watch the birds in February into the evening. February is the first month of the year with evenings ; January's night dreps with the end of the afternoon. But the morning is the time first to walk out over the saltmarshes, and to watch bow the life of the seashore and estuary and the level pastures edging the water mingles and differs; there is never a hard margin, but here and there you may recognise a mark which dis- tinguishes and sets apart. On the level spaces of the meadows you may see birds which belong in winter to the shores and estuaries feeding side by side with birds of the woods and open fields. In one large meadow there will be two or three flocke, separate or joined by stragglers; wood-pigeons walking grey and blue among starlings and green plover, and curlew and pigeon quartering the same few square yards of sunny grass. In the late afternoon, from the bank below the spinney at the edge of the meadow, rabbits creep out to leap and gambol over the short-cropped turf; perhaps the oddest co& bination is a dozen or so of rabbits munching grass and abasing each other, and among them a pair of curlews care- fully probing the worm-casts. There the land meets the life Of the shore ; and so, too, they meet on the very rim of the makings, where you may watch a great bronze cook pheasant stalk contentedly, pecking within a few yards of a flock of red- shank ; even at a distance the sun glints brilliance on his burnished baok: The' most brilliant light of all gleams and vanishes. That is when the kingfisher, over yellow sedge streaked with runnels of thrush-egg blue, darts a tropic spark to a twig of tamarisk.
Over the level miles of the Essex marshes and pastures the sun sets with great glories of light which never shine on the woods and hills of midland counties. The mist of the low-lying land refracts and diffuses the glow and the Splendour of the slanted rays, it may be; the light takes on intenser depths, as if it were doubled and mirrored. The vision of a heron flying low against a marshland sunset, with the cold of the iuflowing tide beneath him and his wings flapping like a slow black butterfly, recalls almost all that a February evening may hold by broadening eastern waters. But the heron is no more the bird of the saltmarthes than the bird of inland fens and quiet river reaches. The cry of the curlew has more of the spirit of the place ; a wild cry, a wail that belongs to blowing winds and surging tides, and a buoyant, challenging call to all wildfowl within hearing. The curlew cries the true note of the wild; be has read the secrets and the perils of all lonely and enchanted places; he knows more enemies than friends. But be, too, is a bird of the upland and moorland ; he recalls mountains and grouse moors. If there is a bird whose cry and flight mean all that the salt- niarsh holds in the frosty vapours and mounting sunlight of February, it is the redsbank. The redshank flies in com- panies and alone. Alone, his note is the tnournfullest thing,
a cry. of lost searchings in the wind. But the redshanlc in companies has all the joy of movement, of glitter, of sudden whims and graces of drill and order. Those are the true types of the sights and sounds of the saltmarsh in February; the lament of the redshanke in the wind over the brimming, 'tides, and the flash of the white underfeathers of a hundred in a company wheeling and circling in the sun.
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