WADING BIRDS, 197 
serves, any curious and inquisitive deviations from the 
rides and paths through them which a naturalist might 
be inclined to make being forbidden, except you are one 
of the privileged ones. Nevertheless, the frequency of 
their breeding with us can be fully proved any summer’s 
evening by the numbers which may be seen as they leave 
the woods for their feeding grounds. 
An interesting fact in the natural history of the wood- 
cock has lately been cleared from a doubt which hung 
around it; I refer to the question whether it utters an 
alarm note, or whistle, when flushed in covert. For 
myself I had no more doubt of this fact, than that it 
utters an ordinary call in feeding time, or during the 
season of pairing, for I have repeatedly heard this note 
of alarm when aroused. Many appear to have thought 
that the bird rises mute, and strange to say many 
sportsmen were of this opinion, but others of great ex- 
perience, and who have combined the observant character 
of the naturalist with the energy of the sportsman, have 
clearly testified to the fact that an alarm note is uttered 
by the bird on rising. 
In the beginning of January, 1859, a woodcock whose 
plumage was entirely white was shot in Thoresby Park. 
The Common Snipe (S. gallanago) is numerous wher- 
ever the ground is suitable to its habits. It is chiefly a 
winter visitor, though birds have been killed in summer, 
and I have been told on good authority that its eggs 
have been found on one or two occasions, but I have not 
seen them. In severe winters they are very fearless, and 
I have noticed them close to my own garden. During 
a hard frost, when the ground was covered with snow, 
I started one from a drain in a low-lying meadow, three 
days together, and within a few yards of the same spot, 
