276 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 



On the 8th of October, 1856, Mr. Dowell and a friend 

 shot twelve woodcocks on the Blakeney sand-meals,, 

 beginning only at two o'clock in the afternoon, and 

 therefore looking over only part of the ground ; the 

 previous night had been thick and rainy, with the wind 

 north by east. He has also known Overton, the gunner, 

 kill three and four couples a day, at such times, on the 

 beach and sand-hills, having fallen in with a fresh flight^ 

 but, as a rule, on the next morning not a bird is to be 

 found. 



Like most nocturnal migrants the woodcock is 

 attracted in its flight by any glare of light, and thus 

 examples are not unfrequently picked up dead during 

 the autumn months at the foot of our lighthouses, killed 

 by their contact with the windows above, of which 

 instances have come to my knowledge at Cromer,* Hun- 

 blackbird is mentioned in these accounts, and being entered 

 in the thirty-ninth week after the eighth of February, the date 

 would fall about the first week in November. Pennant, also, 

 gives some interesting particulars of the arrival and departure 

 of woodcocks on the Suffolk coast from the observations of Sir 

 John Cullum, Bart., most of which are equally applicable to this 

 county. Amongst others it is stated that examples have been 

 taken up exhausted in the streets at Southwold; and that "when 

 the redwing appears on the coast in autumn, it is certain the 

 woodcocks are at hand ; when the E/oyston crow, they are come." 

 In like manner the redwings are the harbingers of their return in 

 spring. 



* The Eev. W. B. Daniel in his " Rural Sports" (vol. iii., 

 p. 159) makes special reference to the fact of woodcocks being 

 thus attracted, and says that many instances have occurred at 

 the Cromer and Eddystone lighthouses. He also states that in 1796, 

 at the lighthouse on the hill of Howth, a pane of plate glass more 

 than three-eighths of an inch thick was suddenly smashed by a 

 woodcock flying against it with such violence as to break its bill, 

 head, breastbone, and both wings. Bishop Stanley says also that, 

 " no less than five woodcocks have killed themselves in a similar 

 manner against the plate glasses of the South- Stack light-house, in 

 Anglesey." See also Mr. Cordeaux's account (" Zoologist," 1867, 



