Page:The Migration of Birds - Thomas A Coward - 1912.pdf/148

124 Some writers affirm that birds only migrate on the wing, but the journey by sea of many species is varied in method. Those very regular migrants, the puffins and guillemots, which the light keepers assure us leave and return to their stations almost at fixed dates, move by slow nautical stages, swimming and feeding as they go, On May 2nd, 1911, I watched a red-throated diver slowly travelling north; it actually travelled farther beneath the surface than either by swimming or flying, so long as I had it in view. The penguin's migrations cannot possibly be on the wing. Dr Brooks rightly contended that the periodic assemblage of wandering sea-birds at their "rookeries" is true migration, regular as the almanackalmanac [sic], although the feeding area is immense and the birds do not reach home by any single path. Seebohm tells us of young bean geese migrating in full moult, marching in an army to the interior of the Tundra, and Mr W. H. Hudson, in "Birds and Man," relates a pathetic story of a pair of upland geese in southern Buenos Ayres. His brother saw them in August, the early spring of South America, leaving the plains where they had wintered to breed in Magellanic islands. The main flocks had departed, but these two birds, the female with a broken wing, were steadily moving south, the male taking short flights and waiting for her, as if to urge her on, and the female