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evening, and the windows of the large school building, which fronts the sea, were 

 open, and the lights within were of course visible out at sea. Suddenly the roonas 

 were invaded by a host of pied wagtails which swarmed in, circling round and 

 round the ceilings like bats, and were easily caught with butterfly nets. I 

 suggested at the time that these were the Welsh birds, which were crossing over 

 in order to pursue their way to the south coast of England, and so eventually over 

 to France ; and I am pretty sure that this was the right explanation. If it has 

 not been confirmed, so far as I know, by the reports of the light-house keepers in 

 those parts, that is probably owing to their want of energy and knowledge. 



Some of these birds may go directly over Devonshire and a^vay to sea at 

 once ; but it is likely that the greater number gather along the south coast, moving 

 in an easterly direction uutil the strait is narrow enough for them to cross 

 comfortably. I have seen them in September in such countless numbers in 

 ploughed fields by the Dorset coast that I could be sure they were in process of 

 migration, and a most admirable writer, the late Mr. Knox, has well described how 

 they move gradually eastward in Sussex. I think then that we can hardly doubt 

 that such Welsh wagtails as migrate at all, do so by crossing the Bristol Channel, 

 making for the southern coast, and keeping along it until it suits them to cross 

 again to France. But there is abundance of room for further observation, which 

 in the case of conspicuous birds like these, could hardly be a difficult and surely 

 would never be an ungrateful, task. 



I should like to say much more about this bird ; but I must confine myself 

 to two brief observations. 



These pied wagtails are among the birds which have the knack of 

 building in odd places. I have somewhere read of a pair which built on the axle 

 of a shunted railway carriage on a branch line ; when the nest was finished and 

 eggs laid, it happened that the carriage was brought into use again, but the bird 

 continued to sit on its nest during successive journeys, and finally reared its young 

 in safety. Bishop Stanley also tells a similar story of a wagtail which built its 

 nest under the half-deck of a pleasure boat which was in frequent use, and there 

 also succeeded in bringing up its brood ; and of another which built iu a noisy 

 factory, within a foot of the wheel of a lathe. In my home in Oxfordshire they 

 are very fond of choosing holes in the stacks of coal at the station, possibly from a 

 kind of protective instinct which prompts them to select a home where their black 

 hue might enable them to slip in and out unobserved. 



The variations of colour in this bird are almost endless ; the sexes are 

 different, and different at different times of the year, the male costume in winter 

 being very like that of the female in summer ; and the young in first plumage, as 

 is the case with all wagtails, differ in the most marked way even in a single family. 

 Some are grey-brown all over, with only a few black marks, e.g., on the throat ; 

 some are almost black, or very grimy and sooty-looking. These young birds often 

 puzzle the uninitiated during autumn and winter, and I have heard them called 

 grey wagtails even by a naturalist of some pretension. But (though I cannot now 

 say more about these various stages of plumage) you cannot well be mistaken if 

 you reckon all wagtails that are black and white, or grey and white, and that have 



