WINTER DAYS ON BREYDON 35 



goldfinches, flying due south, following the coast-line : silently, 

 like the brown ghosts of birds, they flew hour after hour 

 thousands upon thousands ! I wondered whence they were 

 trooping and whether, but for stress, they would have still set 

 at defiance the promptings that impelled many of their rela- 

 tions, two months ago, on their migration southwards. 

 Surely these were they who had landed in Scotland and 

 would have stayed there ! Bunches of five, ten, twenty-, and 

 fifty straggled and struggled along, odd birds, fagged right 

 out, alighting now and then to rest awhile. They passed 

 almost within arm's length, many of them. I could have 

 caught them with a landing net ; and their line of flight lay 

 between the sea-licked edge of the snowy plain and low-water 

 mark, over a ribbon of clear sand some fifteen yards in width. 

 The silent hosts opened on either side of me as might a regi- 

 ment of infantry, as I walked north ; they did the same as I 

 came back homewards, slightly closing their formation again 

 as they proceeded ahead of me. Unfortunately the morning 

 was gloomy, and my trusty Zeiss glasses a little too powerful for 

 their nearness, so that had the smaller hosts contained rari- 

 ties, they would have passed on unidentified. I longed to 

 have my smaller " operas," but no gun ; for I abominate that 

 spirit which leads to the slaughter of hosts of small migrants 

 for the sake of (reputedly) adding a new species to a county's 

 fauna. I would rather spend half my life among the mudflats 

 and not know that some rare and new species of wader was 

 watching me daily, than know and name it, if it meant my 

 taking away the life it is as much entitled to as I am to mine ! 

 Here the ichthyologist, however sentimental, scores, for all 

 rare and most common fishes are caught more or less by acci- 

 dent ! He may sit all day, for years, angling from a rock, 

 seeking in vain a Batistes capriscus^ and to-morrow it may be 

 cast up on the shore by the scornful sea! Sua cuique 

 voluptas ! 



The poor black-headed gulls fared badly enough ; they left 

 Breydon en masse, and betook themselves to the lower 

 reaches of the rivers. I surprised thirty or more of them by 

 running unexpectedly to them up a river-bank, putting 

 them to flight, for a short time, from ink-black sewage water 

 running from a sewer outlet. These birds, too, swarmed the 

 outlying gardens, and alighted on the public roads ; people 



