NATURE AND SPORT IN BRITAIN 



age in May, June, or July. In East Anglia these birds 

 have become familiar in recent years on Breydon 

 Water, near Yarmouth, and, with the protection they 

 are afforded, may possibly even attempt to nest again 

 in Britain. In Sussex they are scarcer. Still, they 

 occasionally pay our marshes a surprise visit. A 

 specimen, shot, I regret to say, a few years since on 

 the eastern part of Pevensey Level, is to be seen, 

 stuffed, at the inn near the sluice. 



Many interesting birds, some resident, some merely 

 migratory visitors, are to be seen on the marshes and 

 their shore-line.^ Snipe and wild duck are fairly 

 common, teal and widgeon occasionally met with. In 

 hard winters many of the rarer wildfowl and sea-ducks 

 become familiar. In the hard and prolonged frost of 

 January and February, 1895, wild geese were to be 

 found in many parts of the Marsh. So tamed were 

 they by cold and starvation that they were actually seen 

 resting in the garden of a Marsh farmer, and could 

 have been shot from one of the homestead windows. 

 Not many were killed ; they were, as a farmer's son 

 said to me, too poor to be worth eating. Many rare 

 sea-ducks were about the coast at the same time. I 

 remember that while skating near the sea, within 

 a mile of Eastbourne, on some flooded hollows amid 

 the wide expanse of shingle known locally as the 

 " Crumbles," wildfowl flew over the heads of the crowd 

 of skaters on several occasions ; among these I noted 

 that beautiful duck the Golden-Eye. This strange 

 expanse of pebble beach, the Crumbles, runs from 

 Pevensey to Eastbourne, and is about three miles in 

 length by three-quarters of a mile at its widest part. 

 It has many attractions for wild birds, and at one time 



^ During the winter of 1902 some Glossy Ibises — far wanderers indeed 

 — were about the Marsh, and a few specimens were shot. 



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