60 THE CURLEW 



spondents from far and near as to reassure me, and to 

 seduce rne into further garrulity. This time the incentive 

 comes from the southern hemisphere, in the shape of a 

 letter from a brother Scot settled as a farmer in the 

 Transvaal. ' The only home birds I have come across 

 here likely to be migratory (always excepting the swallow) 

 was the good old whaup twice and the cuckoo once. I 

 startled the whaup out of some rushes on the edge of a 

 pan near Kimberley. He only gave the ordinary winter 

 wheep, and did not venture a warble or shrill. The 

 cuckoo gave no sound, but I was so near there was no 

 mistaking his shape and plumage. I found him in a 

 bosky dell on a mountain-side. ... It touches a Gallo- 

 vidian on the tender chords of sentiment.' 



Full well I know the farm where the writer was reared 

 a gray-roofed, white-walled, solid dwelling set in a 

 green fey upon a steep, where the brown moorland falls 

 steeply away to the western sea ; and well can I imagine 

 how the whaup's shrill alarm-note set many old memories 

 astir in the mind of this Galloway lad, for there is no 

 bird more closely associated with the westland than is 

 the whaup. It may even have been that this very 

 curlew, plying its quaint, bent bill among the ooze at 

 Kimberley, was bred upon the moors where my corre- 

 spondent first saw light; for it is the invariable practice 

 of migratory fowl to pass to the northernmost limit of 

 their annual migration before nesting, and the curlew's 

 winter range extends far south of the equator. For a 

 number of years past I have gone to Caithness or Suther- 

 land for the early salmon-fishing, and often arrive there 

 before the curlews. The whole mass of these birds and 

 the peewits move southward in autumn, so far that not 



