420 BIRD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS 



forty hours' incessant snowfall, the morning- of March 3rd 

 at last broke fine, though the wind still blew strongly, 

 and my front-door was enveloped in a drift which, we 

 found, measured rather over six feet in depth. During 

 this time we had been to a great extent deprived of 

 news from outside, each town and village being cut off 

 from its neighbours, and it was only as communication 

 was gradually restored that we learnt the full extent of 

 the storm. 



As soon as railway communication was partially re- 

 opened, I received a letter from my puntsman (on March 

 6th), telling me of the arrival of the geese. On the 

 afternoon of March 2nd, he wrote, after some thirty-six 

 hours' incessant snow-blast, the geese began to appear in 

 thousands. Flight after flight, all that afternoon, they 

 came pouring in from the sea ; their dark columns all 

 blended with the driving snow, and alighting in dense 

 masses in the harbour, and even along the mud, close to 

 the village. During the night the arrival still continued, 

 as could be judged by their notes, and on the morning- 

 of the 3rd the numbers which had come were roughly 

 estimated as " into the 'teens of thousands " ! Two swans 

 also passed to the northward on the 3rd, the first seen 

 that season, and fresh bodies of geese kept coming in all 

 day from sea, until the total aggregate could not then be 

 estimated (as I saw myself a few days later) at less than 

 20,000 ; and this in a single harbour, where there had 

 not been over 400 or 500 geese all the winter. 



In connection with this extraordinary influx of geese 

 on March 2nd and following days, let us first examine 

 the state of the weather abroad, especially in Denmark 

 and the Lower Baltic. The frost in Denmark, which 

 had been extremely severe towards the end of February — 



