BBENT GOOSE. 37 



appearance at Blakeney towards the end of autumn, 

 remarks, " these birds arrive about the end of October 

 in a flock of from one to three hundred, at which time 

 they are most excellent eating, but by the end of winter 

 they get strong and coarse. This flock does not seem 

 to receive any accessions except in very hard weather. 

 They never come into the harbour except at high tide, 

 remaining till the half ebb, when they return to the 

 sand beach and sleep till the tide makes again. But 

 few are killed here owing to their extremely wary habits, 

 and to their frequenting the harbour so little, and to the 

 punts being unable, from their small size, to follow the 

 geese to sea. By the end of March most of these geese, 

 like other wild fowl, have taken their departure, but in 

 1847 I observed that a few still frequented the harbour 

 as late as the 3rd of May." Mr. Dowell also gives 

 another instance of the unusually late stay of this species 

 on that portion of our Norfolk coast, a Blakeney pilot 

 having shot two which were very tame in the first week 

 of May, 1852. The Eev. C. A. Johns in his " British 

 Birds in their Haunts" (p. 477), alludes to the abundance 

 of these geese on the Norfolk coast in the severe winter 

 of 1860-61, at which time he remarked that the brents 

 regularly repaired to the salt marshes adjoining Thorn- 

 ham harbour, which he was told was their usual place 

 of resort. A few examples of this most common species 

 may be met with during any winter in the Norwich 

 market and still more at Lynn in nearer proximity to 

 their haunts ; but I never remember them so abundant 

 as during the long and severe frosts that prevailed in the 

 winter of 1870-71.^ On the 13th of January some eight 



* As before remarked, this severe -wmter was remarkable 

 for the extreme scarcity of all other species of wild geese 

 except the pink-footed and brent. In 1803, also, when, as stated 

 by Montagu (" Supp. Orn. Diet.") on the authority of Mr. Boys, 

 of Sandwich, — brents were innumerable on the Kentish coast. 



