Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/220

194 immigrant Mistletoe-Thrushes (increasing numbers of which annually arrive every autumn) have taken their departure. Old cock Blackbirds begin to swarm in coast hedgerows, and in fact in every tall rough fence and coppice for miles inland, till we are amazed at their astonishing plenty and the facilities offered for the "four-and-twenty Blackbirds all baked in a pie." These Blackbirds, also the Thrushes which move later, do not appear to congregate into flocks on departing, but gradually thin off and disappear from their temporary retreats as the spirit moves them. This, however, is not the case with the northern Thrushes—Fieldfares and Redwings. Both are gregarious, and the former pre-eminently so; for days before setting off, Fieldfares sit in great flights in the middle of pastures, or crowd the summits of lofty trees within sound of the surf. Wild by nature and noisy to a degree, their harsh "yack-chuck-chuck" is about the most familiar of the bird sounds in the marshes. This mild winter has been very favourable for them with the abundant crop of hips and haws, yet with all this abundance neither young nor old have forgot the track of the Norway wind and the path to the summer home. Their going out is a long and protracted business, often not completed, although it begins early, before the middle or end of May. Redwings—most plentiful during this winter—are in a degree less gregarious, but they have much the same habits as their congeners, and leave at the same period as do the emigrating Thrushes (T. musicus), and they make a much more rapid and complete work of it than the Fieldfares, for we shall not find a Redwing after March, or middle of April at the latest, in the park-lands, paddocks, or meadows bordering the streams, where they have been hopping all the winter.

It is remarkable, considering the millions of Larks which for weeks and months pour on to the east coast in autumn from early in August to Christmas, so little is known of their emigration. Such, however, is the case; they succeed in slipping off quietly and unobserved, and probably, as in autumn, in straggling companies, and at night. Larks, however, do not always adopt open order on their migrations, and I have known them, under certain meteorological conditions, approach the coast in densely packed flocks like clouds, and hundreds of yards in extent.