74 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
as to attract attention from the least observant, and 
formed a general topic of conversation for days after. 
Although, judging from the sound, they appeared to 
come and go, there was nothing to indicate a direct 
movement in any particular direction, but rather, as 
observed on former occasions, a hovering round, their 
cries never altogether ceasing, though occasionally 
almost dying away in the distance. From subsequent 
enquiries I found they had been heard in all parts of the 
city, and for at least two or three miles round in every 
direction.* The main body evidently consisted of golden- 
plover, and with them were also lapwings and redshanks, 
in much smaller quantities. Occasionally the unmis- 
takeable “ crake”’ of a tern was heard, quite apart from 
the rest, and I believe I also recognised the scream of 
the black-headed gull;+ whilst in the general Babel of 
* A correspondent in the “Field” of September 2nd, 1865, writing 
from Norwich, mentions this same flight, on the 23rd of August, 
but seems not to have detected the variety of notes. He speaks of 
a large flock of golden plover being heard over the city from 
9.30 to 1 a.m., of which, as he stood in a field listening to them, 
“there appeared to be thousands,’ and by imitating their notes 
with a common dog-whistle he was at times “surrounded by 
them,” and could hear their wings “ buzzing through the air.” 
+ Lord Lilford, in his “Notes on the Ornithology of Spain” 
(‘‘ Ibis,” 1865, p. 176), particularly refers to the “extraordinary cries 
of birds during the night,” as observed by himself both in England 
and on the Continent. ‘‘ Once,” he writes, “I listened for at least 
ten minutes to the continuous cry of a flock of birds, which cry I 
can only liken, and that very slightly, to the screech of the night- 
heron (Nycticoraz griseus). Again, on the esplanade at Corfu, in the 
summer of 1858, about 1 a.m. on a July morning, he was startled 
by “an uproar as if all the feathered inhabitants of the great 
Acherusian marsh had met in conflict over head.” It was 
impossible to render any idea of the “ Babel of sounds,” most of 
which were quite unknown to him, although a practical ornitholo- 
gist, but amongst them he recognised “the wail of a curlew, the 
cry of more than one species of tern, and the laugh of some 
