198 THE BIRDS OF SHERWOOD FOREST. 



the bird showing little signs of shyness, and allowing me 

 to approach closely before taking wing. 



The little Jack Snipe (S. gallinula) is occasionally 

 met with in the winter. Like the larger species, it will 

 frequently return to the spot from which it is roused. 

 . It seems possessed of a secret worth knowing viz., how 

 to live well, for it is always in good condition, and never 

 seems to suffer even in the hardest frosts. In the severe 

 winter of 1849-50, when fieldfares and redwings, through 

 the long continuance of the frost, were so greatly ema- 

 ciated as to be little else than skin and bone, allowing 

 themselves to be approached within two or three yards, 

 a jack snipe was brought to me which surpassed any I 

 ever saw. I skinned it for preserving, and found its 

 whole body covered with a layer of solid fat to the depth 

 of a quarter of an inch not a bad protection against 

 intense cold. 



That bird of singular habits and note, the Landrail 

 (Crex pratensis\ visits us in abundance every year, 

 sometimes arriving as early as the 1st of May, while in 

 1853 I did not hear its note until the 18th. This was 

 unusually late, the season being a remarkably cold and 

 backward one, a fact of which our other migratory, birds 

 also seemed, in some mysterious way, to be fully cog- 

 nizant. Nothing, indeed, relating to the feathered tribes 

 is more wonderful or more deserving of our admiration 

 than that knowledge, call it instinct or what you will, 

 which, implanted in them by their Creator, enables them 

 to hasten or delay their departure for their distant but 

 temporary places of abode, according as the seasons there 

 are suitable to their necessities or otherwise. How 

 strikingly is this wisdom brought forward in Holy 

 Scripture to shame man's neglect and ingratitude ! 



