NETTING BIRDS ON THE W 'ASH. 189 



birds imbue it with life, and change its loneliness into 

 an interesting region full of pleasant company for him 

 who loves the feathered tribes and their ways. Reader, 

 picture to yourself a vast level plain many miles in 

 length and perhaps five miles in width at low water, 

 principally composed of mud, full of little pools, and here 

 and there a large pond, and covered with a network of 

 streams which rise and fall in volume with the ebbing 

 and flowing tide, a sea-bank clothed with long coarse 

 grass, ragwort, sea reeds, musk thistles and thickets of 

 sallow thorn, below which on the sea side is a foreshore 

 of rough broken ground full of hummocks and water 

 holes and clothed with grass, sea lavender, and other 

 marine plants, and on the land side is a broad dyke 

 beyond which are corn stubbles, turnip fields and 

 pastures picture all this, and you will have a faint idea 

 of the mudflats of the Wash. Truly there are stirring 

 scenes of bird-life to be witnessed upon them. Vast 

 flocks of Wild Geese, especially Brent, congregate on 

 the mud banks in company with Scoters and other 

 ducks all waiting for the ebb of the tide. Enormous 

 flocks of Dunlins fly along the margin of the water, 

 and Godwits and Curlews may be heard in all directions. 

 Large parties of Knots run about the shining mud in 

 quest of food, and big Gulls fly to and fro, now and then 

 quarrelling with the Hooded Crows which swarm in 

 hundreds everywhere. Occasionally the whistle of a 



