GOLDEN PLOVER. ras 
the winter months. Probably many of my readers have 
remarked, at such times, the melodious notes of these 
plover, which would seem to be uttered incessantly in 
order to keep the whole body together; and as this 
always occurs when the nights are extremely dark, I 
believe the birds, once drawn within the radius of the 
city lights, become perfectly bewildered, and fly round 
and round for hours, till, at day-break, the spell is 
broken, and they resume at once their direct course of 
flight; for, in no instance have I known, under such 
circumstances, any unusual number observed in the 
neighbourhood on the following morning. I have heard 
them myself on more than one occasion, when sitting 
up late, or from some cause unable to sleep, passing 
and repassing over the house-tops throughout the night, 
their plaintive cries now dying away in the distance, and 
now again so loud and clear over head that it has seemed 
as if a gun fired upwards at the sound must inevitably 
do some execution amongst them; since, though lost in 
the darkness, the noise of their wings is at times quite 
perceptible. 
The following are the dates on which occurrences 
of this kind have come under my own notice during 
the last sixteen or seventeen years, whether residing 
in Norwich or in the immediate neighbourhood ; but it 
is worthy of note that here, in every instance, these 
birds have been heard either in autumn or winter, as I 
have no record of any similar event, at other periods of 
the year :—* 
* That this does not, however, hold good, as a rule, is shown 
by the following note, communicated by Mr. J. Morgan, of 
Stratford-on-Avon, to the “ Field” of March 31st, 1866, p. 273, which 
is additionally interesting from the fact that various species were 
actually picked up dead and examined on the following day; thus 
proving the miscellaneous character of this particular flight, and by 
inference, also, of others, where many different notes have been 
