1919-] Birds in the North of France. 57 



east, we found the villages (with rare exceptions) entirely 

 destroyed, and here again a few of the village birds still 

 about the ruined houses ; in the fields of this area the 

 ordinary birds of the season were plentiful and unconcerned. 

 When the summer migrants arrived they returned to their 

 old haunts in the half-felled orchards and the ruined houses, 

 and nested quite happily ; swallows were going in and out 

 of the derelict houses within four days of their first appear- 

 ance, and nested in large numbers under almost any shelter ; 

 nightingales and other warblers were not uncommon in 

 woods and copses actually in the firing-line ; corn-crakes 

 and quail were plentiful in the long hay-grass growing 

 round the front-line trenches of this part of Somme. 



In the following winter (1917-18) in old-established 

 trenches in the La Bassee sector, which was at that time 

 a quiet part of the line, quite a number of species were to 

 be seen daily actually in and about the trenches in Givenchy 

 and the Brickstacks and in No Man a Land: partridges were 

 common and many finches and pipits, while small fiocks of 

 tree-sparrows were frequently seen on the wire in front of 

 the craters, which divided the German line from ours. 



After the great spring and autumn migrations of Gallipoli 

 and Egypt, the movements in France were bound to seem 

 comparatively uninteresting, and the only really noticeably 

 great one was that of the hooded crows on the coast in 

 October, though a number of quite interesting birds of 

 passage were seen, and an evident migration of such birds 

 as song-thrushes, robins, etc., — some presumably from 

 England — reached the coast towards the end of October. 



In the spring the river Somme south of Peronne, where it 

 runs north and south, seemed to be the route by which many 

 migrants entered Flanders, and lai'ge gatherings of swallows 

 were to be seen there. In the autumn, while near Bapaume, I 

 noticed, on the other hand, that all the swallows and martins 

 were moving from east to west, possibly turning south into 

 a river-valley later on ; here a few birds of passage not seen 

 during the summer, such as wheatears, blue-headed wagtails, 

 and pied flycatchers, lingered for a short time. 



