Birds by Land and Sea 



we conceive of noise, would have drowned into 

 the mighty volume of sound such as it probably 

 seemed to the gnats themselves. A choral utterance 

 upon such a scale can never have been heard among 

 men, for, upon a rough computation, each of these 

 columns would contain six hundred thousand per- 

 formers, and similar columns could be observed 

 wherever one looked. 



Upon such a day the swift left us, and, as if 

 to give assurance that there was no scarcity aloft, 

 the small sand-martins left the river, and, mounting 

 to a great height, continued to hawk about there for 

 the remainder of the day. It is probable that the 

 common gnat is not to the liking of the swallow 

 tribe, for, in spite of their numbers, they seemed to 

 be left undisturbed by the birds. 



We have no great number of house-martins in 

 our neighbourhood, and I had to go to Ashley to 

 find a colony of any importance. There, beneath 

 both eaves and inside the roof of an old wooden hay- 

 shed, is a colony of about a hundred and fifty nests. 

 They are practically continuous often contiguous 

 along both eaves, and in some places a second 

 nest has been affixed beneath the one adjoining the 

 eaves. " I never washes 'em out. Let 'em 'ave their 

 bit o' pleasure like anybody else," an old hand on the 

 farm said to me ; and this, no doubt, is the reason 

 why the birds flock back every spring to the old shed. 



What a tumult there is when they first arrive ! 

 What a mad chasing of one another with wild cries 



