Found -- a couple of pages from a magazine loosely inserted in a bird-spotter's book. They are from 1967 and seem to me from a magazine about or sponsored by PNEU -the Parents’ National Education Union -an affiliation of schools throughout the British Isles and the world**. In an article by Dinah Lawrence* a freelance journalist and novelist she discusses wild life in March. The style is reminiscent of the nature notes still found in The Guardian and gently parodied by Evelyn Waugh as long ago as 1938 in Scoop. After discussing Jung and Freud Dinah Lawrence talks about Professor Hardy's recent Gifford Lectures which, as in his book The Living Stream, make a link between Natural History and religion.... she then discusses bird life:
I start listening for Chif -chaffs about the middle of March. I have only heard their light, non-carrying voices once as early as 6th March. I also go to a friend's land, well before the end of the month, to see if the Sand-martins have arrived at her huge sandpit. They seem to start work straightaway, even after their long journeys, for the birds that roost in the reeds in the valley nearby, do seem to be the birds that are going on, farther north. The activity of digging out holes for nesting places is a fascinating operation to watch. The steep faces of the sandpit are pocked with old ones and these feathery-legged birds sometimes clear these and sometimes start new ones. If you stand below on the floor of the sandpit, little jets of sand puff out from old and new holes: the birds scuff the sand out with their feet, as they go burrowing in, head first.
