AUTUMN AND WINTER BIRDS 123 



It is night, and I am waiting for the flights in the 

 lighthouse tower, where I have been since afternoon. 

 The season is the time of the heaviest migrations, 

 and I am right in the track of the migrants. For 

 nights past numbers of birds have been arriving and 

 departing, and, as the sea- weather is " thick," more 

 are expected. The daughter of the lighthouse- 

 keeper is trimming the lights. The old man himself 

 is busily engaged in filling in schedules, which are 

 next year to form the materials from which to com- 

 pile a Report on the Migration of Birds. He shows 

 something more than an intelligent interest in his 

 subject, knowing most of the birds by name, and 

 describing the flight and call-notes of the species he 

 does not know so accurately as to render ultimate 

 identification by competent naturalists certain. 



It is now nearly one o'clock. A strong east wind 

 blows over the North Sea, with fog and drizzling rain. 

 For hours flocks of larks, starlings, mountain- 

 sparrows, titmice, wrens, redbreasts, chaffinches 

 and plovers strike the light, and five or six hundred 

 have fallen. Thousands of birds are flying round the 

 lantern, their white breasts, as they dart to and fro 

 in the light circle, having the appearance of a heavy 

 fall of snow. This is continued hour after hour. 

 The majority of these are larks, starlings and 

 thrushes. A thousand must have struck the light 

 and gone into the sea. The keepers of the lighthouses 



