344 HISTORY OF 



glers, who, not having strength or courage suffi- 

 cient for the general voyage, take up from neces- 

 sity their habitation here. 



In general, during the summer this whole class 

 either choose the coldest countries to retire to, or 

 the coldest and the moistest part of ours to breed 

 in. The curlew, the woodcock, the snipe, the 

 godwit, the grey plover, the green, and the long- 

 legged plover, the knot, and the turnstone, are 

 rather the guests than the natives of this island. 

 They visit us in the beginning of winter, and for- 

 sake us in the spring. They then retire to the 

 mountains of Sweden, Poland, Prussia, and Lap- 

 land, to breed. Our country, during the sum- 

 mer season, becomes uninhabitable to them. The 

 ground parched up by the heat, the springs dried 

 away, and the vermicular insects already upon the 

 wing, they have no means of subsisting. Their 

 weak and delicately pointed bills are unfit to dig 

 into a resisting soil, and their prey is departed 

 though they were able to reach its retreats. Thus, 

 that season when nature is said to teem with life, 

 and to put on her gayest liveries, is to them an 

 interval of sterility and famine. The coldest 

 mountains of the north are then a preferable ha- 

 bitation ; the marshes there are never totally dried 

 up, and the insects are in such abundance, that, 

 both above ground and underneath, the country 

 swarms with them. In such retreats, therefore, 

 these birds would continue always, but that the 

 frosts, when they set in, have the same effect 

 upon the face of the landscape as the heats of 

 summer. Every brook is stiffened into ice, all 



