WOODCOCK. oT 
stanton, and Hasborough. A fine woodeock in my own 
collection met its death in a somewhat similar manner 
close to this city. It was found on the 23rd of October, 
1858, against the wall of Mr. Towler’s residence, 
adjoining Park Lane ; and in this instance, no doubt, 
the lamps on Unthank’s Road, which passes in front 
of the house, had so dazzled it that the next instant 
it dashed with full force against the front of the 
building. On examining it soon after it was picked 
up, I found the frontal bone completely smashed 
in. Others are also, occasionally, found dead under 
the telegraph wires,* having flown against them in their 
migratory course, and some, I imagine, meet with a like 
fate in their ordinary nocturnal flittings. On one or two 
occasions I have had freshly killed woodcocks offered me 
for sale by the porters at the stations between Norwich 
and Yarmouth, or by men at work on the line, which, 
in such a locality, are very likely to have been thus 
suddenly arrested in their flight from the woods on the 
one side to their marshy feeding-grounds on the other 
side of the railroad.t In “The Naturalist” for 1853 
p. 1011) of woodcocks, wild ducks, snipes, gold-crested wrens, &C., 
being picked up dead on the balcony of the Flamborough lght- 
house. ‘The light keeper informed him that “ the woodcocks 
usually arrived with a north or north-east wind. Had once seen 
some arrive during the day.” 
* A still more remarkable occurrence was recorded in the 
“ Zoologist’” for 1866 (p. 271), by Mr. A. P. Smith, of Ipswich— 
namely, the death of a woodcock, from being impaled on the arrow 
end of a weathercock on one of the churches of that town, when 
passing over, it was presumed with others, on a dark night. 
+ A correspondent in the “ Field” of March 21st, 1868, gives 
a remarkable instance of the serious injury which a bird of this 
kind may sustain through contact with the wires, and yet survive 
the blow. In this case “an extreme lacerated wound extended 
from the junction of the neck with the body in an oblique direction 
across the breast from the left to the right side, separating all the 
pectoral muscles from their insertions into the keel of the sternum, 
