170 Notes ON BirD MIGRATION IN THE DISTRICT. 
district during practically the whole of the winter months, so that 
it was a species which in a mild season actually would live 
through the winter in Scotland, and so obviate the necessity of 
migrating at all. But that observation applied rather to odd 
individuals of the species; the great bulk returned to winter 
quarters round the southern shores of the Mediterranean and 
further to the east. It came very quickly back again, however, 
and along the south of France and in the milder latitudes in the 
east of Spain it arrived very early in February. This year the 
first of the species were seen close to Sanquhar on 25th March, 
or something like a fortnight earlier than the usual date. 
Another of those species, odd members of which might occa- 
sionally linger through a mild winter in the south-western corner 
of England—Cornwall, Isle of Wight, and such districts—was 
the chit-chaff. It was one of the three warblers which formed 
such a very large proportion of the summer birds throughout 
Great Britain. One or other, and in many cases the whole three, 
were to be found in every district from the south of England right 
up to the Shetlands. In this district we didn’t as a rule see a 
chit-chaff before 15th April, but this year if was seen on 1st 
April, and within three days thereafter its familiar double 
note could be generally heard. The swallow and sand 
martin were two really typical migrants. Many people 
thought they alone were the migrating birds, and _ that 
all the others were more or less stationary. He didn’t 
understand how such an erroneous notion had arisen. The 
swallow and sand martin came pretty often together. As a rule, 
the sand martin was a day or two in advance, and nearly the 
whole of the “early swallows’’ which were paragraphed in the 
newspapers were in reality, not swallows, but sand martins. This 
year the swallow appeared on 30th March, the earliest date that 
had ever been recorded in Scotland. The same evening sand 
martins were seen, and next day both species were pretty general 
over the whole country. It was towards the early afternoon of 
the first April before anything like large parties appeared, and 
these were seen all over Galloway especially—not so many in 
Dumfriesshire, except towards the western portion, but all over 
western Galloway they were comparatively abundant. The 
arrival of the species he had named pointed out a very interesting 
circumstance, and that was that there was a migration line over- 
