JANUARY 5 



fowl, and am thrown back upon independent speculation. 

 It seems pretty clear that the > is the result of an 

 obligation on the part of every bird in the flock to keep 

 his eye on the appointed leader. If they were to follow 

 in a disorganised crowd, they must jostle one another, for 

 they are heavy in proportion to their size, with no power 

 of soaring, keeping themselves aloft by rapid strokes of 

 relatively short wings. Jostling would be dangerous 

 work, for these wings are exceedingly powerful, as I 

 realised last spring, when a 'cob' or male swan, seizing 

 with his bill the wing of another cob which had ap- 

 proached imprudently near the young brood, battered 

 him to death by repeated wing-strokes. The head of the 

 unfortunate intruder was one mass of bloody bruises. 

 There is good cause, then, for all water-fowl, from the 

 lordly whooper to the diminutive teal, to avoid striking 

 their comrades in flight ; so, to conform with the obliga- 

 tion to keep an eye on the leader, each bird in the flock 

 has to fly outside of the bird in front. The leader is 

 followed by two birds ; the two next keep outside the first 

 pair ; the third pair outside the second ; and so on to the 

 last pair, widely separated from one another at the rear- 

 ward extremity of the > . 



There are eight species of wild goose known hi the 

 British Isles (not counting the so-called solan goose or 

 gannet, which is not a goose at all, but a cormorant) 

 the gray-lag, the white-fronted goose, the bean goose, the 

 pink-footed goose, the barnacle, the brent, the snow 

 goose, and the red- breasted goose. The last two are very 

 rare visitors ; the others frequent our shores every winter 

 in great numbers ; but among them all, only the gray-lag 

 has ever been known to nest with us, which it does upon 



