74 BIEDS OP NORFOLK. 



as to attract attention from the least observant, and 

 formed a general topic of conversation for days after. 

 Althongh., judging from the sound, they appeared to 

 come and go, there v^^as nothing to indicate a direct 

 movement in any particular direction, but rather, as 

 observed on former occasions, a hovering round, their 

 cries never altogether ceasing, though occasionally 

 almost dying away in the distance. From subsequent 

 enquiries I found they had been heard in all parts of the 

 city, and for at least two or three miles round in every 

 direction.^ The main body evidently consisted of golden- 

 plover, and with them were also lapwings and redshanks, 

 in much smaller quantities. Occasionally the unmis- 

 takeable ^' crake" of a tern was heard, quite apart from 

 the rest, and I believe I also recognised the scream of 

 the black-headed gull ;t whilst in the general Babel of 



* A correspondent in the " Field" of September 2nd, 1865, writing 

 from Norwich, mentions this same flight, on the 23rd of August, 

 but seems not to have detected the variety of notes. He speaks of 

 a large flock of golden plover being heard over the city from 

 9.30 to 1 a.m., of which, as he stood in a field listening to them, 

 "there appeared to be thousands," and by imitating their notes 

 with a common dog-whistle he was at times "surrounded by 

 them," and could hear their wings " buzzing through the air." 



t Lord Lilford, in his " Notes on the Ornithology of Spain" 

 ("Ibis," 1865, p. 176), particularly refers to the "extraordinary cries 

 of birds during the night," as observed by himself both in England 

 and on the Continent. " Once," he writes, " I listened for at least 

 ten minutes to the continuous cry of a flock of birds, which cry I 

 can only liken, and that very slightly, to the screech of the night- 

 heron (Nycticorax griseus). Again, on the esplanade at Corfu, in the 

 summer of 1858, about 1 a.m. on a July morning, he was startled 

 by "an uproar as if all the feathered inhabitants of the great 

 Acherusian marsh had met in conflict over head." It waa 

 impossible to render any idea of the " Babel of sounds," most of 

 which were quite unknown to him, although a practical ornitholo- 

 gist, but amongst them he recognised " the wail of a curlew, the 

 cry of more than one species of tern, and the laugh of some 



