74 RAPIDITY OF FLIGHT. 



A curious way of guessing at the speed of a Pigeon's flight 

 has been noticed in America. Birds have been shot which, 

 on opening them, were found to have fed on coffeeberries so 

 fresh that they could not have been in the stomach above four 

 or five hours ; but, as the nearest part of the country known 

 to produce coffee was some hundreds of miles distant, it was 

 calculated that they must have flown at the rate of sixty or 

 seventy miles per hour. 



But besides this great speed, many even of those apparently 

 least calculated for continued flight can remain on the wing 

 for a much longer time than we are apt to imagine, from seeing 

 them slowly and heavily waddling, as in the case of farmyard 

 Ducks and Geese, or of a Sparrow, hopping leisurely from 

 bough to bough, or flitting from thence to the house-top. Thus 

 the tame domestic Geese belonging to several Cossack villages, 

 near the river Don, in Kussia, leave their homes in March or 

 April, as soon as the ice breaks up, and take flight in a body 

 to the more northerly lakes, the nearest of which must be five 

 or six hundred miles off, where they breed and constantly re- 

 side during the summer ; but in the beginning of winter the 

 parent birds return with their young ones, each alighting with 

 its brood at the door to which it belongs. That flights of this 

 sort are not confined to Russia, we may learn from the follow- 

 ing instance corroborating the fact just mentioned. A gentle- 

 man walking near Aberdeen, in Scotland, one morning, during 

 a heavy gale which blew from the north-west, was attracted by 

 a loud cackling overhead ; from the awkward motion of their 

 wings he was certain they were not wild Ducks, and they 

 seemed to him to be helped on as much by the wind as their 

 own exertions. He next day heard that the duck pond of a 

 person in the neighbourhood had been deserted the morning 

 before, about the time he saw them, by thirty Geese, which 

 had all taken flight, and not been since heard of. 



An instance of uncommon flight, though not to the extent 

 of the above, occurred not long ago in Yorkshire. A person 

 had a large flock of Geese, which fed on high ground not 

 visible from the house. They were lessened, as occasion 



