8 WOODCOCKS 



land's keepers have had instructions to mark such wood- 

 cock chicks as they can find during the summer. During 

 two seasons, 1893 and 1899, no young birds were marked ; 

 in the remaining thirteen summers two hundred and 

 sixty-nine have had a metal label attached to the leg, 

 stamped with N and the year of capture. The number 

 of birds so marked annually has ranged from four in 

 1894 and six in 1895 to forty-nine in 1904 and fifty-one 

 in 1905. Now, if it may be assumed, as is generally 

 believed, that British-bred birds migrate southwards in 

 whiter, it was not probable that many of the duke's 

 labels would be understood and reported if recovered in 

 the Mediterranean region. Down to the close of 1903, 

 twenty-eight labels out of one hundred and sixty-nine 

 had been found on birds shot within the British Isles ; 

 which evidence, so far as it goes, is adverse to the 

 theory of a universal southern migration, for all these 

 birds, except three, were shot between the beginning of 

 November and the end of January. One of them, marked 

 in the summer of 1903, was shot in Forfarshire in 

 November of the same year, actually one hundred miles 

 north of the place it was reared. 1 



There is no period of the day which has so many 

 synonyms in our language as evening gloaming, dusk, 

 twilight all of them musical words. In the above- 

 quoted passage from an old sporting book occurs another 

 an unmusical one about the origin of which there has 

 been a good deal of speculation. It is not uncommon 

 in Elizabethan literature. 



1 While these pages are going through the press, I receive notice of 

 another woodcock behaving in an unorthodox manner. Marked at 

 Alnwick in May 1906, it was shot at Heriot in Midlothian in the 

 following autumn. 



