198 Short Notes. 
the sky.’ The flocks were travelling at a height at which they were quite 
invisible in the cloudy air, and from minute to minute they kept dropping 
down into sight, and so perpendicularly to the very surface of the river or 
of the eyot. One of these flocks dropped from the invisible regions to the 
lawn on the river bank on which I stood. Without exaggeration I may say 
that I saw them fall from the sky, for I was looking upwards, and saw 
them when first visible as descending specks. The plunge was perpendicular, 
till within ten yards of the ground. Soon the high-flying crowds of birds 
drew down, and swept for a few minutes low over the willows, from end to 
end of the eyot, with a sound like the rush of water in a hydraulic pipe. 
Then by a common impulse the whole mass settled down from end to end 
of the island, upon the osiers. Those in the centre of the eyot were black 
with swallows—like the black blight on beans. Next morning, at 6.30, a.m., 
every swallow was gone. In half an hour’s watching not a bird was seen. 
Whether they went on during the night, or started at dawn, I know not.” 
This letter was followed, in the issue of Sept. 22nd, by another, from Mr. 
E. F. Catford, dated Swindon, Sept. 19th, describing a precisely similar 
scene at Coate, near Swindon :—“ A few days ago, at Coate, near Swindon, 
within a stone’s-throw of the house where Richard Jefferies was born, the 
swallows gathered one evening in thousands—the sky seemed black with 
them—and settled in an osier bed, quite near the public highway. They 
descended in precisely the same manner as at Chiswick—as it were, ‘they 
fell from the sky,’ or, as an eye-witness put it, came ‘like bullets from a 
gun. A like scene, too, has been witnessed this week at Lechlade, in 
Gloucestershire, the birds here again choosing an osier bed. The gathering 
at Coate is specially remarkable because of its annual recurrence; it has 
happened every year for thirty years at the same osier bed. Can such 
unfailing regularity be explained? And can Mr. Cornish or any other 
naturalist tell us why the birds seem always to prefer osiers P”’ 7 
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