4 THE BIRDS OF HELIGOLAND 



counlries whose symbol, the Sphinx, still raises her weather-worn 

 head from the lap of buried ages. 



The months of winter depart ; budding Nature heralds the 

 approach of spring ; already is she assuming her dress of green ; 

 and after one mild night the hedges and bushes of our gardens, our 

 groves and fields, are once more crowded with our feathered friends. 

 The homely Swallow busily flutters around her nest of the preced- 

 ing year. We can tell by his gestures that the Wliitethroat in 

 yonder bushy hedge is an old acquaintance of ours, and when, a few 

 nisjhts later, the soulful song of the Nightinofalo is carried to us from 

 the dense, dark underwood by yonder pond, we seem with glad sur- 

 prise to recognise her as the same bird to whose notes we have already 

 listened with rapture during many a fragrant niglit of spring. All 

 have happily escaped the many dangers of their long journey. 



Amid such charming scenes the migration of birds proceeds in 

 neai'ly all latitudes of the globe. Far different, however, is the 

 picture presented on this solitary island of the North Sea. In 

 place of olive-groves and palm-grown oases, waste sandhills and 

 desolate rock-chasms are all that now, as in the remotest ages, here 

 meet the wanderer's gaze. None of them finds the goal of his 

 journey on this bare and rugged isle — all pass it in untiring haste. 

 Spring here is not ushered in by the jubilant return of the feathered 

 songsters to the longed-for nesting homes, nor does autumn strew 

 her golden leaves on the path of their departure; silently the 

 flocks pass the inhospitable rock, where no wood or thicket or 

 waving corn-field offers a homely nook for rearing the young brood. 

 Only those grotesque members of the bird-world, the Auks and 

 Guillemots, find an inapproachable dwelling on its steep and surf- 

 beaten cliff, where on narrow crags and ledges, amid the fury of the 

 storm, they hatch their eggs unsheltered by a nest, while their 

 harsh, unmelodious voices mingle in manifold discords with the 

 roar of the never-resting waves. 



But though this storm-swept rock has thus been deprived of all 

 those pleasing scenes which surround the migration of birds, 

 especially in spring, in other lands. Nature, ever a loving mother, 

 has here too endeavoured to make compensation : for though grace 

 and ornament may be wanting, their loss is amply balanced by the 

 extraordinary and unexampled grandeur in which the phenomena 

 of migration are displayed on this island. 



The main peculiarity of Heligoland, i.e. the almost Arctic char- 

 acter of its coasts, is made strikingly manifest by the manner in 

 which the earliest precursors of re-awakening bird-life Tnake their 

 appearance on the island. These first arrivals are the Guillemots 

 already mentioned as making their homes on the rocky ledges of 



