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Updated: May 5, 2025
The stems of the willows fringing the small fresh-water ponds mellowed to bronze before one's very eyes; the dull reaches of salt grass turned emerald; the steely tint of the sea softened to azure and glinted golden in the sun. How shrill sounded the cries of the redwings in the marsh! How jolly the frogs' twilight chorus! The miracle went on with amazing rapidity.
They pass down the river feeding on the mud and among the stones at ebb tide. Among those I have seen are flocks of starlings and scattered birds, mainly redwings, thrushes, blackbirds, and occasionally robins. Sandpipers also migrate up the Thames in spring, and down it in autumn.
Though the tinted leaves were fast falling, the hedges were still full of plants and vegetation that prevented seeing through them. The 'kuck-kuck' of the redwings came from the bushes the first note of approaching winter and the tips of the rushes were dead. Red haws on the hawthorn and hips on the briar sprinkled the hedge with bright spots of colour.
The sun is now rising high above the pine-trees; the morning mist is also rising and rolling off like a golden veil as it catches those glorious rays; the whole earth seems wakening into new life: the dew has brightened every leaf and washed each tiny flower-cup: the pines and balsams give out their resinous fragrance: the aspens flutter and dance in the morning breeze, and return a mimic shower of dew-drops to the stream; the shores become lower and flatter; the trees less lofty and more mossy; the stream expands, and wide beds of rushes spread out on either side; what beds of snowy water-lilies: how splendid the rose tint of those perseicarias that glow so brightly in the morning sun; the rushes look like a green meadow, but the treacherous water lies deep below their grassy leaves; the deer delights in these verdant aquatic fields: and see what flocks of redwings rise from among them as the canoe passes near their bright shoulder-knots glance like flashes of lightning in the sunbeams.
The fieldfares will soon be here now, and the redwings, coming as they have done for generations about the time of the sowing of the corn. Without an almanack they know the dates; so the old sportsmen used to declare that their pointers and setters were perfectly aware when September was approaching, and showed it by unusual restlessness.
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