Crossword-Solution: STONECHATS 10 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 15

Yonder, where the wheat can climb no higher up the slope, are the purple heath-bells, thyme and flitting stonechats.

Stonechats started from the flints and low bushes as we went by; an old crow--it is always an old crow--rose hastily from behind a fence of withered thorn; and a magpie fluttered down the hill to the fields beneath, where was a flock of sheep.

The morning walk to North Ditton across the heath, so bleak and wretched in December, was a daily delight now the sun was glinting over the sea and the gorse was in bud, and the stonechats, which had vanished during the cold weather, were back among the boulders, darting from stone to stone in short, jerky flight, with that sharp, jarring cry which is the prelude to their sweeter spring note.

The stonechats, the larks, the quails, the goatsuckers and the grouse, which abound in the North African and Asiatic deserts, are all tinted and mottled so as to resemble with wonderful accuracy the average colour and aspect of the soil in the district they inhabit.

But they were not the sole occupants of this corner of the Common; other insectivorous species had territories there also--amongst which were Whitethroats, Grasshopper-Warblers, Willow-Warblers, Whinchats, Stonechats, Meadow-Pipits, Tree-Pipits, and Skylarks.