Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/68

42 report. The most noticeable feature was the great number of Robins; there were scores, I think I may say hundreds, of them hopping about this out-of-the-way place, which must have formed a great contrast to their usual haunts amongst homesteads and gardens: they had evidently quite lately arrived, and were resting themselves previously to dispersing over the country or moving still further southward. I am afraid they were only getting a scanty supply of food, for what they could find amongst long grass and sand I can scarcely say. In a small walled garden only a very few yards square, containing a few currant trees, &c., there must have been twenty or thirty of them—native informants said fifty at least—searching for food; and in all the ditches and hedgerows of the cultivated lands further from the coast, Robins were very plentiful. This migration of the Redbreast is not new, but I believe an annual occurrence. Last year at this spot they were even more numerous.

The next birds in point of numbers were the Goldcrests, or "Woodcock-pilots," as they are locally called, and they were everywhere; many of them being so exhausted as to be easily knocked down with a hat, and numbers might have been caught in an ordinary insect-net. Prior to my arrival two Rough-legged Buzzards had been shot; I saw one of them, a very fine female.

There were numbers of Blackbirds, Thrushes and Redwings in the neighbourhood, and small parties of the latter were passing at intervals all day long. There was this difference in these birds, that while the Redwings migrated in small flocks, the Blackbirds and Thrushes did so singly or in twos and threes. I saw a Ring Ouzel and a solitary Fieldfare, but was told that a flock of about fifty of the latter birds had arrived so early as the last week in September, and though I told my informant that he must have been mistaken, he assured me he was not.

A few Woodcocks were shot, and there were numbers of Short-eared Owls and a single Long-eared one, which latter had killed itself against the telegraph-wire. I met two shooters who had bagged no less than nine Short-eared Owls for "screens"; these were afterwards sent to Mr. Richardson, the birdstuffer here, where I dissected several of them, and found the stomachs empty in every case but one, and this contained the remains of a Blackbird, probably found dead beneath the telegraph-wires.