6 BIRDS OF CHESHIRE. 
The small acreage under corn (about fifty per cent. 
of the average for the whole country) and the large 
proportion of grass land undoubtedly influence the 
status of many species. During the last half-century 
farming in Cheshire has greatly improved. Land, wet 
and full of rushes, has been drained—to the detriment 
of such species as the Common Snipe—and its fertility 
largely increased by the use of artificial manures. Not 
only have old and tangled hedgerows, which afforded 
secure nesting-places for Warblers and other birds, been 
grubbed up and replaced by mathematically straight 
thorn hedges or wire fences, but waste lands and mosses 
have been reclaimed and cultivated, with results doubt- 
less advantageous for the common weal, but deplorable 
in the extreme when viewed from the standpoint of the 
field-naturalist. 
Unfortunately there is no record at all of the birds 
found in Cheshire more than sixty years ago, and we 
can only speculate with regard to the Marsh Harriers, 
Bitterns, Short-eared Owls, and Teal, which, with the 
Twite and other species, probably nested on the ex- 
tensive peat-mosses, of which fragments only remain in 
places such as Lindow Common, near Wilmslow, and 
Danes Moss, near Macclesfield. Whitley Reed, between 
Great Budworth and Grappenhall, now indistinguishable 
from the surrounding country, is said to have been one 
of the wildest and deepest mosses in Cheshire. It was 
reclaimed during the years 1850-52, and almost all trace 
of its ancient avifauna is lost. Carrington Moss, now 
entirely cultivated, was fourteen years ago a well-stocked 
grouse-moor, comprising about six hundred acres of 
moorland. ‘This, the last to be reclaimed, affords us 
some indication of the primitive condition of the other 
mosses, for, prior to its purchase by the Manchester 
