Oh, I'm going to be. Welcome to this newscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep.

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Tonight we'll be reading another chapter from the book Bird Watching

published in 1901 by Edmund Seis, titled Watching Birds at a Straw Stack.

If you enjoy this episode, be sure to listen to the Blackbirds episode from this book as well.

The author started as a conventional naturalist, but Celis developed a hatred of the common practice at the time of killing animals for scientific study,

and was a pioneer of bird watching as a method of scientific study. The author was a solitary man and was not

well known in ornithological circles. He avoided both the company of ornithologists and reading their observations so as to base his conclusions entirely on his own observations.

And to be clear, straw stacks are similar to hay stacks

in that they are both field crops,

although hay is the remains of grasses and straw is made from the stocks of wheat. Let's get cozy. Close your body.

eyes.

body into the body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths. One of the most interesting ways of watching birds at very close quarters is to conceal oneself in one of the corn stacks or

wheat wrecks that in the autumn begin to spring up like mushrooms all over the countryside.

This is a winter past time and the harder the weather,

the greater will be the results.

To have chaff inches, green finches,

bramblings, tree sparrows, buntings,

yellow hammers, blue tits, starlings, perhaps a blackbird or two, pheasants and partridges, all about one and quite near, one should choose a bitterly cold day

...