None of our British birds probably feels a severe winter more keenly than the kingfisher, for when the streams are frost-bound and icicles hang from the willows where it used to perch so blithely in the summer days, the little creature is in a desperate plight. Insect-eating birds have a last resource in berries and vegetable food, but the kingfisher, when the streams are frozen and the ponds all ice-locked, has nothing to fall back upon, and so he wanders off to the seashore and the mouths of rivers that are still open. "Even here," says a writer, "the poor kingfisher often fares badly, and after an unusual spell of frost numbers of them are picked up starved to death. Sometimes they are found frozen to the branch on which they have been sitting." But in open weather its life is as joyous as any bird's can be, and is passed among the prettiest of scenery.
You will note, or may fancy that you do, that it is
[Illustration: "WHEN THE PONDS ARE ALL ICE-LOCKED"]
always the most delightful bends of the streams, the most charming nooks and corners of the waterways and pools that the kingfisher haunts. Where the scenery is open and tame, he is only a passer-by. But where his beauty adds the one charm of life, and beautiful life, that was needed to make some special "bit" of loveliness complete, there the kingfisher lives. It is a sweet little poem, this bird. Does it see any of the beauty that we do in these archways of willow and alder, this exquisite embroidery of forget-me-nots upon the brink, this clump of yellow flags and fair tall willow-herb? One could almost imagine that it does, so careful is it to pitch its camp just where Nature is at its best. Here the banks are flowered and prettily uneven with mossy stumps and roots "peeping out upon the brook." The moor-hen is at home here, and that delightful, harmless little beast the water-vole.
I remember once seeing a water-vole sitting up at its front door in the sun, nibbling its crisp salad of young reed-shoot: on one side of it grew a tuft of "faint sweet cuckoo-flower," and just above it was a great rosette of primroses, and I thought I had never seen anything more enchanting than this quiet little touch of innocent and pretty spring.