The Coming of the Birds 33 



gatherings, sometimes numbering many hundreds 

 or thousands of birds, recall the more familiar 

 autumn concourses of swallows and martins on the 

 church roofs and telegraph wires, and are marked 

 by the same air of restless expectancy. Strings of 

 birds fly upward with uneasy chatterings, and then 

 return to their perches, conscious that the moment 

 is not yet come. While the fieldfares delay to 

 leave the mild English fields for the later and colder 

 spring of the Baltic pine-forests, the birds which 

 nest in England are already streaming into the 

 woods and hedgerows. For several weeks before 

 the coming of the swallow and the cuckoo makes a 

 public proclamation that the birds' spring move- 

 ment has begun, less conspicuous birds of passage 

 are pressing, like the tide among the sandbanks of 

 an estuary, into their summer homes. 



The curlew is classed among resident birds ; but 

 all through autumn and winter it vanishes as 

 completely from the high inland moors where it 

 breeds as if it had joined the swallows in Africa. 

 The curlew departs about August to the seashore 

 and oozy estuaries, and may travel onwards into 

 the south ; and its return, with its wild cry, to the 

 hail-streaked uplands is as distinctive a mark of 

 spring as the piping of the nightingale under the 

 sallow-blossom in Kentish copses. In the valleys 

 of the Lake Country even such familiar birds as 

 the song-thrush and greenfinch are summer migrants 

 like the cuckoo or the swallow, though they are 

 absent for a shorter time. 



The movements of the species which do not 

 3 



