113 



THE SWALLOW 

 Hirundo rustlca (L.). 



Swallows arrived along the whole o£ the south coast, 

 but first and chiefly along the western half. 



A single bird was picked up starved at Reading (Berkshire) 

 on the 20th of December 1911, and another was seen daily 

 in Cornwall (on the south coast) from the 29th of February 

 to the 10th of March. One appeared in Cardigan on the 

 2nd of March, four in Surrey on the 21st, and stragglers in 

 Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Hampshire, Kent, Somersetshire, 

 Wiltshire, Hertfordshire and Essex during the last week of 

 the month. By the middle of the first week in April 

 Swallovvs were thinly distributed over the whole country as 

 far north as Yorkshire, and a single bird was seen in the 

 Isle of Man on the 5th. 



The first immigration of any magnitude began on the 3rd of 

 April, and thence-forward Swallows continued to arrive daily 

 on some part of the south coast up to the 21st of May. The 

 movement seems to have been at its height between the 13th 

 of April and the 6th of May, after which date there was 

 a perceptible slackening, though immigrants continued to 

 arrive steadily in smaller numbers in the west up to the 

 19th and intermittently elsewhere up to the 21st. The 

 western arrivals seem always to have been on a larger scale 

 than the eastern ones, and the western counties filled up at an 

 earlier date than the south-east and east. Thus consider- 

 able numbers were recorded from several Welsh counties 

 and the western Midlands, and Swallows had already 

 penetrated some distance into Scotland at a time when most 

 of the eastern counties w^ere still recording first arrivals. 



Most of the records from the licjhts were concerned with 



