WOODCOCK. 275 
tired, however, to pass on at once to more secure shelter— 
particularly those whose powers, as above stated, have 
been previously enfeebled—many fall victims to the keen 
sportsman, who, from experience knowing when and 
where to look for them, turns out early in the morning 
to search the marram-banks and fences bordering on the 
coast. The Denes and even, as Mr. Lubbock says, “ the 
kitchen gardens on the outskirts of Yarmouth are some 
times, for a few hours, full of these birds; ten couple 
have been killed there by one sportsman.” The rough 
marine herbage* also on the Blakeney “meals” forms 
a like resting place for a time, as well as for the large 
flights of blackbirds, that make their appearance on our 
coast in October so regularly that the gunners in those 
parts are accustomed to search for woodcocks when the 
blackbirds are over.t 
attracted by a sound high up in the air, which “he found pro- 
ceeded from birds descending in a direction almost perpendicular ; 
and which, upon approaching the shore, separated and flew towards 
the interior.” Some alighted in the hedges close by, which he 
pursued and shot, and these proved to be woodcocks. 
* Amongst the plants which here form a shelter for our 
feathered migrants, and a grateful relief to the eye after that wide 
waste of ooze and shingle, are the remote flowered sea lavender 
(Statice bahusiensis), sea lavender (Statice limonium), seaside 
starwort (Aster tripoliwm), annual seablite (Sueda maritima), 
shrubby seablite (Suceda fruticosa), seacoast wormwood (Absin- 
thium maritima), and stalked sea-purslane (Obione portulacoides). 
Spurn Point on the Yorkshire coast, as we learn from Mr. 
Cordeaux (“ Zoologist,” 1868, p. 1318), is a similar resting place 
for the woodcock and goldcrest in the autnmn, offering like shelter 
in the marram grass, sea bind-weed, sea-holly, and thickets of 
prickly sallow-thorn. 
+ The following extract from the “‘ Household Book” of the 
L’Estranges, of Hunstanton, seems in a remarkable manner to 
confirm the joint arrival of these two species, thus recorded as far 
back as 1522. “Itm. pd to Stephyn Percy for ij woodcocks and 
iiij blackbyrds, iiijj4-” This is the only instance in which the 
2N 2 
