THE NORTHWARD FLIGHT 63 



locomotion is so rapid that it baffles the casual observer. It 

 is little wonder that the poets the naturalists of the past 

 conceived such ingenious theories for the annual disappearance 

 of the birds. For centuries the popular idea was that the king- 

 fisher built her nest on the waves of the ocean in calm weather 

 hence the term " halcyon days." The belief that swallows 

 went beneath the water to hibernate was quite undisputed, and 

 Dr. Johnson even describes their method of going. " A 

 number of them," he says, " conglobulate together by flying- 

 round and round, and then, all in a heap, they throw them- 

 selves under water, and lie in the bed of a river." Even 

 Gilbert White held the theory of hibernation, till his belief was 

 upset by a duck being shot in a neighbouring \aHage, bearing 

 on its neck a silver plate engraved with the arms of the King 

 of Denmark. This seems to have turned the great naturalist's 

 thoughts towards the theory of migration, which eventually 

 quite superseded the idea of hibernation. 



And now the question which puzzled the philosophers of 

 the ancient world is an every day fact, and every schoolboy 

 knows that the kingfisher builds no watery nest, and that the 

 swallows do not lurk beneath the mud of a pond, but leave us 

 to spend the winter in Northern Australia. 



With such a range of distance and climate as our conti- 

 nent possesses, there is no need for our birds to leave Aus- 

 tralia itself, and very few of the birds that breed in Victoria, 

 New South Wales, or Tasmania, go further afield than North 



