WILDFOWL OF THE NORTH-EAST COAST 293 



have witnessed them. The masses of detached ice, split 

 up by their own weight into fragments of all sizes and 

 shapes, and carried here and there by the currents, drive 

 helter-skelter in the tideway, and along the lee shores are 

 thrown up into ridges and rugged piles, extending for 

 miles along the shore. Outside this barrier of stranded 

 ice-blocks, the floating floes, swept along by tide-currents, 

 grind and crash against each other, piling up cake upon 

 cake till they form miniature icebergs, and present a 

 spectacle such as few have seen outside the Arctic 

 regions. 1 



Severe frost, even though unaccompanied by snow, 

 equally seals up the feeding-grounds : for then, between 

 tides, mudflats and shallow pools, with all the vegetation 

 thereof, are frozen hard as steel. At such times one may 

 see small boys "sliding" on oozes that in open weather 

 would scarce bear a redshank ! 



The effect of such metamorphoses upon the fowl are 

 obvious ; great part of their feeding-grounds are rendered 

 inaccessible to them. At low water, or during neap tides, 

 hundreds of acres of the mud are buried under stranded 

 ice-floes, and as the tide sets them afloat the whole area 

 is occupied by these blocks, rushing, driving, and careering 

 forward on the current. So great is the turmoil that it is 

 in the highest degree unsafe to venture among the moving 

 ice in a gunning-punt ; and, of course, for the fowl it is 



1 An apparently similar result is produced by heavy snowfalls, even 

 when unaccompanied by hard frost. The snow which accumulates 

 during low water on the flats becomes solidified by the rising tide, and 

 floats away in large blocks closely resembling ice. These, however, 

 are comparatively soft and "rotten," and can be penetrated by a punt 

 without danger, and with but little trouble. We had plenty of this 

 half-frozen drift snow during the early part of the month of January 

 1887, and in many subsequent winters. 



