It was the last day but one of my fortnight in that remote deer forest to which I had come, in May, only to watch birds. I cooked and slept in the lodge at the lochhead, a roomy stone house in a clump of larch and fir trees, and for the past 10 days I had been trying to locate a nest which I had never yet seen.
Even egg collectors admit that the greenshank’s nest is one of the hardest of all to find, for it is usually far out in a featureless wilderness. The hen sits exceedingly close and there are probably no more than two minutes a day between dawn and
