BRITISH BIRDS AND BIRD LOVERS. 175 



woods. Blackbirds soon perish in severe weather, privation of 

 food conspiring with the external cold to enfeeble them. The 

 thrush, by dint of an occasional snail dragged out of its 

 hibernaculum, has a better chance of life. Few people are 

 aware what havoc a severe winter makes amongst our garden 

 friends. "I estimated that the winter of 1854-5 destroyed 

 four-fifths of the birds in my own grounds, and this is a 

 tremendous destruction when we remember that ten per cent 

 is an extraordinary severe mortality from epidemics with man* 

 Our British birds are commonly weather-wise, and a laggard 

 swallow left behind by his brethren only serves as the excep- 

 tion to prove the rule. These departing flights of birds are 

 seldom caught by inclement weather. Before it comes they 

 take the wings of the north wind, and, after great parade and 

 many preludes of flight from the top of the old barn or the 

 tallest house of the neighbourhood, disappear one evening, and 

 next day it is speedily found that summer has fled with them. 

 We have, however, seen occasional stragglers among the 

 hirundines ; a chimney swallow, for instance, which hawked 

 round a church during the sunny hours of noon on three days, 

 in the middle of November, 1865, and a swift in the middle of 

 September, 1874, but a miserable end was in store for these 

 lingerers, unless we believe the last century's theory of their 

 sub-aqueous hibernation. Sometimes, too, sea-birds are driven 

 inland by severe weather which has caught them on the coast, 

 and then they perish miserably. Thus a Fulmar petrel was 

 killed in a turnip-field in North Lincolnshire in 1867, which 

 was unwounded, but from the buffetings of recent severe 

 weather was apparently unable to rise from the ground ; and in 

 1865 the same fate befell a red-necked grebe (Podiceps rubri- 

 collis] in that district, which though a distinctly marine species, 

 was knocked on the head in a small pond inland after in- 

 clement weather. " There is a common notion that animals 

 * Darwin's Origin of Species, 1st Ed. p. 68. 



