loG BIKD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS. 



is a series of almost straight linos, and a great proportion of 

 this extent is occupied by lofty cliffs, rising sheer from the 

 sea. Even where the shores are low and flat, the lines are 

 so straight as to leave no extent of foreshore — that is, the 

 space between high and low water-mark is merely a long 

 strip of sand, shingle, or rock, only a few hundred yards in 

 width at the utmost. Neither of such situations are at all 

 congenial to the requirements of wildfowl, properly so 

 called. The sandy stretches attract a few small waders, 

 and the cliflfs afford suitable homes for the Gulls, Guille- 

 mots, and other rock-birds. Flamborough Head, the Fame 

 Islands, and the beetling grey precipices of St. Abb's Head, 

 in Berwickshire, are notable breeding resorts of those birds ; 

 but such iron-bound coasts are the last places in the world 

 for true wildfowl. 



Then, too, the encroachment by man on the foreshores has 

 seriously interfered with the few localities which, in former 

 days, attracted large numbers of fowl to this coast. The 

 development of the northern coal and iron trades has trans- 

 formed what fifty years ago were desolate tidal wastes into 

 busy scenes of human industry — their once-deserted shores 

 now flanked by towns, docks, and factories, with their con- 

 comitants of smoky chimneys and the other paraphernalia of 

 " civilization." From such places the altered conditions 

 and the incessant turmoil of revolving paddles and pro- 

 pellers have effectually banished the fowl — never to return. 

 Such a spot is Jarrow slake, on the Tyne, and the Tees- 

 mouth is rapidly following suit. 



The places which are the most favoured haunts of wild- 

 fowl are precisely those which are least frequented and least 

 congenial to man — the most remote and lonely expanses of 

 tidal ooze. Such conditions usually only prevail either at the 

 estuaries of large rivers, or on those low-lying parts of the 

 coast where land and sea are engaged along the boundary 

 line in one ceaseless perennial struggle for dominion — their 

 battle-ground a vast level stretch of sand, mud, and ooze, 

 which lu'c telliis est, ncc mare. In such a spot, at low tide, 

 the eye roams over an almost illimitable expanse of flat, 

 featureless foreshore ; miles away in the far distance, across 



