SEPTEMBER. 



A LATE AND EARLY SEASON. 



September 4. Nature's seasons of 1902 were both 

 earlier and later than usual earlier because the chilly 

 summer caused mahy birds to leave off breeding, and 

 thus set them free to travel before their time ; and 

 later because the lack of sunshine retarded all 

 growth. From these combined causes we were 

 threatened with the actual disappearance of all our 

 summer birds before the crops had been cut; but the 

 closing week of August brought a change. The 

 wind, which had hovered so persistently about the 

 north and east, set steadily in the south and west, 

 and, though this brought deplorably wet weather for 

 the farmers, it set the unsteady tide of bird migration 

 flowing back again, insomuch that, by the beginning 

 of September, some of the eastern districts had more 

 summer birds than in any previous month. Some, 

 however, had gone beyond recall. The cuckoo, who 

 left us at the beginning of July, and the butcher- 

 birds, that followed early in August, had travelled 

 too far for any winds to bring them back. The 

 swifts are early migrants too, and they cover such 

 immense distances in a day, feeding as they fly over 

 league upon league of landscape, that counties must 

 seem to them scarcely larger than parishes to the 

 little warblers, and kingdoms than counties. 



