276 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
On the 8th of October, 1856, Mr. Dowell and a friend 
shot twelve woodcocks on the Blakeney sand-meals, 
beginning only at two o’clock in the afternoon, and 
therefore looking over only part of the ground; the 
previous night had been thick and rainy, with the wind 
north by east. He has also known Overton, the gunner, 
kill three and four couples a day, at such times, on the 
beach and sand-hills, having fallen in with a fresh flight, 
but, as a rule, on the next morning not a bird is to be 
found. 
Like most nocturnal migrants the woodcock is 
attracted in its flight by any glare of light, and thus 
examples are not unfrequently picked up dead during 
the autumn months at the foot of our lighthouses, killed 
by their contact with the windows above, of which 
instances have come to my knowledge at Cromer,* Hun- 
blackbird is mentioned in these accounts, and being entered 
in the thirty-ninth week after the eighth of February, the date 
would fall about the first week in November. Pennant, also, 
gives some interesting particulars of the arrival and departure 
of woodcocks on the Suffolk coast from the observations of Sir 
John Cullum, Bart., most of which are equally applicable to this 
county. Amongst others it is stated that examples have been 
taken up exhausted in the streets at Southwold; and that “ when 
the redwing appears on the coast in autumn, it is certain the 
woodcocks are at hand; when the Royston crow, they are come.” 
In like manner the redwings are the harbingers of their return in 
spring. 
* The Rev. W. B. Daniel in his “ Rural Sports” (vol. iii, 
p. 159) makes special reference to the fact of woodcocks being 
thus attracted, and says that many instances have occurred at 
the Cromer and Eddystone lighthouses. He also states that in 1796, 
at the lighthouse on the hill of Howth, a pane of plate glass more 
than three-eighths of an inch thick was suddenly smashed by a 
woodcock flying against it with such violence as to break its bill, 
head, breastbone, and both wings. Bishop Stanley says also that, 
“no less than five woodcocks have killed themselves in a similar 
manner against the plate glasses of the South-Stack light-house, in 
Anglesey.” See also Mr. Cordeaux’s account (“ Zoologist,” 1867, 
