Sometimes as you are walking under the trees on the banks of the Coln you come across a little heap of chipped wood lying on the ground.  Then you hear “tap, tap,” in the branches above.  It is the little nuthatch hard at work scooping out his home in the bark.  He sways his body with every stroke of his beak, and is so busy he takes no notice of you.  The nuthatch is very fond of filberts, as his name implies.  You may see him in the autumn with a nut firmly fixed in a crevice in the bark of a hazel branch, and he taps away until he pierces the shell and gets at the kernel.  Nuthatches, which are very plentiful hereabouts, are sometimes to be found in the forsaken homes of woodpeckers, which they plaster round with mud.  The entrance to the hole in the tree is thus made small enough to suit them.  Sometimes when I have disturbed a nuthatch at work at a hole in a tree, the little fellow would pop into the hole and peep out at me, never moving until I had departed.

Woodpeckers are somewhat uncommon here:  I have not heard one in our garden by the river for a very long time, though a foolish farmer told me the other day that he had recently shot one.  A mile or so away, at Barnsley Park, where the oaks thrive on a vein of clay soil, green woodpeckers may often be seen and heard.  What more beautiful bird is there, even in the tropics, than the merry yaffel, with his emerald back and the red tuft on his head?  The other two varieties of woodpeckers, the greater and lesser spotted, are occasionally met with on the Cotswolds.  I do not know why we have so few green woodpeckers by the river, as there are plenty of old trees there; but these birds, which feed chiefly on the ground among the anthills, have a marked preference for such woods in the neighbourhood as contain an abundance of oak trees.  The local name for these birds is “hic-wall,” which Tom Peregrine pronounces “heckle.”  There is no more pleasing sound than the long, chattering note of the green woodpecker; it breaks so suddenly on the general silence of the woods, contrasting as it does in its loud, bell-like tones with the soft cooing of the doves and the songs of the other birds.

In various places along its course the river has long poles set across it; on these poles Tom Peregrine has placed traps for stoats, weasels, and other vermin.  Recently, when we were fishing, he pointed out a great stoat caught in one of these traps with a water-rat in its mouth—­a very strange occurrence, for the trap was only a small one, of the usual rabbit size, and the rat was almost as big as the stoat.  There is so little room for the bodies of a stoat and a rat in one of these small iron traps that the betting must be at least a thousand to one against such an event happening.  Unless we had seen it with our eyes we could not have believed it possible.  The stoat, in chasing the rat along the pole, must have seized his prey at the very instant that the jaws of the trap snapped upon them both.  They were quite dead when we found them.