362 Stray Notes on the Bifds of Anglesca. [Sess. 



during the day, and consequently force themselves upon our 

 notice with greater prominence. The strange gurgling notes 

 of the coot, the quivering cry of the curlew, the plaintive and 

 melancholy calls of the peewit and golden plover, the whistle 

 of the woodcock, and the many wild calls of the sea-birds 

 flying overhead, carry with them after dusk a weird and 

 " eerie " feeling that is not easily explained, — any more than 

 we can account for the difference between a person wandering 

 through an empty house during the day, and the same indi- 

 vidual repeating the performance after nightfall. In the 

 former case he perambulates the rooms without fear, whereas 

 in the latter he does so with considerable reluctance, often 

 trembling at the sound of his own footsteps ; yet if asked to 

 give a reason for the change, there are a hundred chances to 

 one he fails to give even a shadow of such. To return to the 

 snipe. It is always a difficult task to describe a sound, so 

 that another unacquainted with it can form any idea of its 

 likeness ; and in the case of the present species, the nearest 

 approach I can think of is as follows. Imagine the distant bleat- 

 ing of a goat, the hum of the nocturnal beetle while on the wing, 

 add to these the sound produced by one of those primitive little 

 instruments that street boys affect so much, called, I think, 

 " mouth harmonicons," mix them all up, and you have some 

 distant sort of notion of the booming of the snipe. This you will 

 no doubt consider a heterogeneous conglomeration, and so it is ; 

 but it only exemplifies what has already been hinted, of the diffi- 

 culty in making any essay to delineate what is wellnigh an im- 

 possibility. Before proceeding, it is necessary to remark that 

 the peculiar drumming sound is believed by almost all our emi- 

 nent ornithologists to be produced by the action of the wings 

 or tail, or both combined, and not by the throat : the ordinary 

 alarm-note is, of course, produced by the latter. The other birds 

 observed as haunting the pool were the little grebe or " dooker " 

 as it is sometimes called, the common mallard or wild duck, 

 an occasional pair of widgeons, besides sundry stray species that 

 flew up from the sea, including a variety of gulls and other 

 maritime wanderers. The whin-covered undulating country 

 was a " happy hunting-ground " for cuckoos — in fact, I never 

 recollect seeing or hearing so many of those birds in a short 

 time in any one district, not even in Perthshire where they 



