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IN NORFOLK BY THE SEA 







once on the wing and it is a different story. Down 

 at him drop the terns one after another, stooping and 

 cutting at him till they beat him off. And even the 

 big herring gulls when they fly over are followed far 

 and mobbed by the terns. But there is one foe with 

 which the terns sometimes forget to reckon, and this 

 foe is the tide. It happens by a timely dispensation 

 that the smallest spring tides in all the year fall just 

 at nesting-time, so that they are called the "bird- 

 tides " in this place. But, low by comparison as they 

 are, even so they sometimes catch many eggs, foolishly 

 laid on the lowest spots. 



Lucky indeed it is for the terns that the arch-robber, 

 the hoodie crow (called here the " Densh," i.e. the 

 Danish crow), is absent now. It is in autumn and 

 winter that the hoodie comes to feed on the big 

 mussels smashed by being dropped on the stones from 

 a height. 



Many of the little green crabs that sidle round 

 in the creeks lose their lives to this bandit crow. 

 These little crabs have queer quaint ways well 

 worth the studying if we had but time. We shall 

 cross several small creeks as we go to the sandhills 

 from the marshy and there one cannot but notice 

 how the crabs travel from point to point in beaten 



