BRITISH SMALL BIRD MIGRATIONS. 373 



Shooting, would be singularly incomplete without 

 some further mention of a subject so intimately 

 connected with every phase of it as that of mi- 

 gration. 



Most of the birds which furnish sport to the wild- 

 fowler's gun, or enliven the neighbourhood of our 

 English groves and hedgerows with the voices of 

 feathered songsters, are migrants, which have no per- 

 manent abiding place upon our shores. 



This we say not only with regard to birds of a 

 notoriously migratory disposition, but also as respects 

 most of our feathered friends, whom we justly regard 

 as permanent residents of our farms and gardens, 

 because under stress of weather of phenomenal sever- 

 ity they also take wing; and fly away to more hos- 

 pitable shores, where the rude hand of winter presses 

 less hardly upon them. 



An instance of a wholesale migration of this kind 

 occurred during the severe winter of 1878, and we 

 refer to it more particularly because we happened 

 to be in the country at the time, and can therefore 

 state from personal observation the fact of the almost 

 complete disappearance of small birds during that 

 winter: and many of them did not return till well on 

 in the spring of 1879. Hares also turned more or less 

 completely white as in Russia, a thing that had never 

 before been noticed in that part of the country by 

 the oldest inhabitants. * 



This unusual migration of the feathered tribes known 

 to be permanent habitants goes far towards establishing 

 the fact, that all birds are endowed with a certain 

 amount of this migratory disposition, and that it only 



* As per observations made and recorded at Hilton Park. 



