246 BRITISH BIRDS. 



breast and belly dirty white, clouded with cinere- 

 ous; sides and scapulars dark ash, edged with 

 white: back plain ash: coverts of the tail white: 

 the folded wings extend beyond the tail:* lesser 

 coverts of the wings lig'ht grey, nearly white; 

 middle deeper, tipped with white: primaries and 

 secondaries grey, tipped with black: feet and legs 

 saffron colour; claws black. 



This species is common in this country, and 

 large flocks of them, well known to the curious, in 

 all the various shapes which they assume in their 

 flight,t are seen regularly migrating southward in 

 the autumn, and northward in the spring.+ 



Wild Geese are widely and numerously spread 

 over all the various parts of the northern world, 



* The quills of our specimen had probably not attained their full 

 growth. 



t This elevated and marshalled flight of the Wild Geese seems 

 dictated by geometrical instinct : shaped like a wedge, they cut the 

 air with less individual exertion; and it is conjectured, that the 

 change of its form from an inverted V, to an A, an L, or a straight 

 line, is occasioned by the leader of the van's quitting his post at the 

 point of the angle through fatigue, dropping into the rear, and 

 leaving his place to be occupied by another. 



+ A gentleman in the county of Durham, one morning in the 

 month of April, observed a flock of Wild Geese going northward, in 

 the line of two objects whose distance he knew to be four miles : he 

 found by his watch the exact time they were in flying this distance; 

 from which he calculated, that if they continued to fly at the same 

 rate for twelve hours, they would be at the Orkneys by sun-set, 

 which is twenty-five miles an hour. But it is not probable that these 

 birds ever migrate from the fens in Cambridgeshire, &c., to the 

 Orkneys, or other places where they breed, in one day, or at one 

 flight; for great numbers of them are known to stop for several days, 

 both in going and coming back again, at the mouth of the Tees, 

 Prestwick-Car, the haughs of the river Till, near Wooler, in North- 

 umberland, and at some places in the Merse, in Scotland. 



