Page:The Migration of Birds - Thomas A Coward - 1912.pdf/66

50 also he to reach a zone or stratum of atmosphere in which flight may be more easily accomplished. Robert Service's account of the departure of migrants from the Solway shores, gives suggestion of high flight. They arrive often one by one and "seem to drop literally from the clouds," but when they actually departed it was easy to see their method. They "fly upwards and onwards, then they hesitate, fly sideways once or twice, again attempt an upward and onward flight, hesitate again, and down they come once more to earth." After repeating this manoeuvre several times, "away they go over the sea." One morning he counted sixty blackbirds in one hedge, and others kept arriving, but, however closely he watched, he failed to see whence they came. "They came down from the upper air, becoming suddenly visible, sometimes three at a time." "I saw about a dozen birds thus drop into view, but I quite failed to see any indication of the point of the compass from whence they had come " (46)

Gätke frequently mentions birds raining down from the sky, appearing first as mere specks, and dropping vertically to the island, and others when departing "with breasts directed upwards and rapid powerful strokes of the wings; fly almost perpendicularly upwards."

On May 24th; 1911, I watched the departure of a spoonbill from Easton Broad on the Suffolk coast.