1 902 Winter on the Norfolk Broads 5 1 



will with certainty retrieve a wounded fowl from a half-acre 

 reed-bush. In fact, few of the old marshmen gunners and 

 flight-shooters of the broads were in the habit of using a dog 

 at all. What birds they failed to kill outright or find at 

 once they looked for round the shore next morning ; and I 

 know one or two such men now whom I would rather have 

 to help me in hunting for a partially-disabled duck than the 

 best dog I ever saw. If the water is not too deep, the reed is 

 often too thick and the old reed stumps too sharp for the dog's 

 feet, however eager and keen to work ; whilst the marsh- 

 man — accomplished in the art, with his store of accumulated 

 knowledge and experience of the habits of fowl under such 

 circumstances, and with eyes and ears ever on the alert to 

 catch sight or sound or movement of reed or water, and with 

 quant pole ever ready to strike the hiding quarry — seldom 

 fails to mark and bring it to bag. Marvellous powers of 

 sight and hearing the native broadsmen have, able as they 

 are in the dark to differentiate the flighting duck by the 

 wing sound, and to distinguish several species by the sound 

 of the splash on rising from the water. 



A curious natural phenomenon to which these wide, ex- 

 posed, and shallow waters particularly lend themselves is 

 the formation of ground-ice, or mare's ice, during a stock 

 frost when the weather is severe, the wind high, and the 

 temperature of the whole body of water below freezing- 

 point. The waves keep the surface from consolidating, ice 

 is formed at the bottom, rises, and drifts away with the wind, 

 and we have the unusual spectacle of the broad freezing up 

 to wind'ard. I have felt the bottom of a running ditch quite 

 hard with ice, and seen the ice in the broad bring up with 

 it large pieces of weed. But this is not what causes the 

 round bare patches, conspicuous from their yellow-whiteness, 

 in the midst of the otherwise weed-covered bottom. These 

 are caused by the opposite extreme of temperature. When 

 the waters are low and the summer sun very hot, the weed 

 rises to the surface in lumps, is scorched by the sun, and in 

 consequence dies and eventually rots away. Now the chief 

 water weed here is a species of chara, and my botanist 

 friend, Mr G. H. Harris, very reasonably suggests that as 

 the chai'a is a great collector of lime, the whiteness of 



