56 Capt. A. W. Boyd on [Ibis, 



II. — Birds in the Nortli of France, 1917-18. 

 By Capt. A. W. Boyd, M.C, M.B.O.U. 



DuiiiNG the thirteen mouths from March 1917 to March 

 1918 I kept fairly careful notes of the birds 1 saw in 

 France. Practically the whole of this time was spent in the 

 Departments Pas de Calais, Somme, and Nord. Naturally 

 it is difficult for an infantry officer to stay in one spot for 

 any considerable length of time, and notes taken in this 

 way are somewhat disjointed and necessarily quite incom- 

 plete. Between March and September 1917 we went up 

 the river Somme to Peronne, east of that town to Roisel 

 and Epehy, north to Villers Pluich and Havrincourt Wood, 

 and finally were in a reserve area at Achiet le Grand near 

 Bapaume. I was then fortunate enough (from an ornitho- 

 logical point of view) to spend just over four weeks of 

 October and November at the base at Etaples, where the 

 river Canche forms a short muddy estuary and a fair variety 

 of birds occurs, and where I had previously spent a day in 

 May ; from November to March 1918 I was in the line in 

 the La Bassee sector, east of Bethune, and in reserve in 

 that area; and finally returned to the neighbourhood of 

 Bapaume during the German offensive at the end of March. 

 I also include notes on the birds seen during a very short 

 stay in France at the end of July and early in August, 1918. 



Going up the river Somme in March, just before the 

 first German evacuation of Peronne, we found the country 

 between Eclusier and Peronne (the scene of part of the 

 early stages of the first Somme offensive) remarkably 

 desolate ; buntings were by far the commonest birds — 

 yellow-hammers in great numbers and common buntings 

 — with many larks of two species and flocks of linnets, but 

 there was little else except hooded crows and odd sparrow- 

 hawks : a very few of the familiar garden birds still clung 

 to the flattened villages — odd wrens, etc., but the house- 

 sparrow seemed to be the only bird that felt really at home. 



Following the retreating Germans from Peronne to the 



