Letters, Extracts, Notices, §c. 175 



under my notice on the road from Kimberlcy to Schmidt's 

 Drift in South Africa. It was in the dusk of the evening 

 of the 9th pf August, 1902, that I witnessed this remarkable 

 exhibition of bird-power. My companion and I were 

 looking for birds by a small dam, when Ave heard a most 

 curious and unusual sound far away in the sky overhead 

 It suggested some mysterious phenomenon of a thunder- 

 storm or even of the supernatural — an indescribable, almost 

 metallic hurtling through the air. More tban once it was 

 repeated, until presently we perceived that it emanated from 

 a party of five or six birds, apparently Totanus stagnatilis, 

 about to alight, in the course of a series of violent 

 avalanche-like descents from the heights above. Every time 

 a bird, as it were, crashed through the air in its headlong 

 descent the souud was repeated. But, unluckily, not one of 

 them reached the ground, as a member of our party in arriving 

 frightened them away, so that, although I knew that they 

 were Waders, I did not manage to identify them in the dusk. 

 I think that the sounds were probably an intensification of 

 those which I have heard emanating from the flocks of Ruffs 

 and Reeves (Machetes pugnax) which frequent the dams of the 

 Orange River Colony during the South African summer, 

 and they, too, were doubtless only an amplification of 

 those caused by the upward and downward swooping of the 

 Dunlins of our own coast. Still, I have never heard any- 

 thing like it before, and it so interested and impressed me 

 that I should much like to receive the opinion of other and 

 more experienced ornithologists on the question. 

 Yours &c, 



Kilmanock House, G. E. H. BaRRETT-HamILTON. 



Artluirstown, Ireland, 

 March 29th, 1904. 



Sirs, — I have read with great interest Mr. Eagle Clarke's 

 paper on " Bird-migration observed at the Kentish Knock 

 Lightship" (' Ibis/ 1904, p. 112). As I spent nearly exevy 

 day in September last searching for and watching the 



