198 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



to me, haunting the bulrushes, conversing together and 

 calHng to one another in their unearthly tones. 



And the birds! Ah, to be back in the Somerset of 

 that far time — the paradise of birds in its reedy inland 

 sea, its lake of Athelney! 



I have often wished to be back in the old undrained 

 Lincolnshire for the sake of its multitudinous wild bird 

 life in far more recent times, as described by eye- 

 witnesses — Michael Drayton for example, no longer ago 

 than the time of Elizabeth. Does any bird-loving reader 

 know the passage? I doubt it, for is there any one in 

 England, including the student of the poetry of that 

 period, who can say with his hand on his heart that 

 he has read the whole of "Polyolbion" — every twelve- 

 foot line of its many thousands, each line laboriously 

 dragging its slow length along? It is hard to read even 

 the hundred lines descriptive of the fens except for the 

 picture conjured up of those marvellous bird gatherings. 

 It was Lincolnshire's boast, according to Drayton, that 

 no such abundance could be seen in any other part of 

 the kingdom. I imagine that there was an even greater 

 abundance and variety in the Somerset lake of pre- 

 historic times. It was a better climate, a more sheltered 

 district, and birds must have been far more numerous 

 in the ages before man found out how to slay them at 

 long distances with guns and to frighten them with 

 smoke and flame and a noise like thunder. 



Now, with Drayton's picture in my mind and many 

 old memories of immense congregations of wild fowl 

 in the lakes and marshes of a distant region, witnessed 



