Page:The Migration of Birds - Thomas A Coward - 1912.pdf/91

Rh word in search of food before there is any marked autumnal southward migration. Terns and black-headed gulls have been found a month or more after they have left the nest to the north of their breeding colonies in Cumberland and mid-Wales. A bird from Ravenglass was taken in its first January in Brittany. Rossitten black-heads have been shot in the Isle of Wight and in Breydon in Norfolk.

This may only mean that the young blackhead is a confirmed wanderer in search of food, but the few results with woodcocks, marked as British-bred nestlings, are puzzling They have been known to linger in the neighbourhood of their home until November, and have been found in Portugal only a month later. Birds marked at Tyrone have been found so far apart as Cornwall, Harrow and Inverness; what route for the Irish birds can be guessed at?

Birds marked as adults present further problems, but also provide interesting evidence. Hooded crows, captured on migration in spring at Rossitten and then released, have been recovered in autumn actually in the same place and in other localities in Germany, and one marked in October was taken two years later, in spring, in Finland. The sum of these records of crows proves one thing conclusively—the fallacy of Gätke's due east to west