Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/195

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Mentioned once in the charm uttered by Oberon when, squeezing the juice of a flower on Titania's eyelids as she sleeps, he says—

Owing to the unusual mildness of the past winter, but few rare birds from the north visited this neighbourhood, and some of our regular winter visitors appeared in much smaller numbers than usual.

Lapwings were the only birds I remarked in- larger numbers than in previous years; they commenced assembling on the sands in August, and by the first week in September the flocks were largely increased. By the 1st October the largest number of Lapwings were to be seen on the sands that I ever remember to have observed. Some of these flocks evidently consisted of homebred birds, but the greater part must have been strangers. The increase in the number of home-bred birds is easily to be accounted for, by the unusually wet spring and summer, rain having fallen on 270 days in the year 1877; the great excess of moisture proving favourable to the increase of the Lapwings' natural food, and thus enabling them to rear their broods with greater ease than in a dry season, when many young birds must perish from want of both food and water.

Woodcocks and Snipe are much scarcer than usual, the former remarkably so. Indeed all the shooters of my acquaintance