164 NATURAL HISTORY 



At present I do not know anybody near the seaside that 

 will take the trouble to remark at what time of the moon 

 woodcocks first come; if I lived near the sea myself, I 

 would soon tell you more of the matter. One thing I used 

 to observe when I was a sportsman, that there were times 

 in which woodcocks were so sluggish and sleepy that they 

 would drop again when flushed just before the spaniels, 

 nay, just at the muzzle of a gun that had been fired at 

 them ; whether this strange laziness was the effect of a 

 recent fatiguing journey, I shall not presume to say. 



Nightingales not only never reach Northumberland and 

 Scotland, but also, as I have been always told, Devonshire 

 and Cornwall. In those two last counties we cannot 

 attribute the failure of them to the want of warmth : the 

 defect in the west is rather a presumptive argument that 

 these birds come over to us from the continent at the nar- 

 rowest passage, and do not stroll so far westward. 1 



Trotton and his friend mistook it for a duck on account of its webbed 

 feet. Cormorants, as is well known, were formerly trained for fishing 

 purposes, and wore collars, usually it is true of leather, but in the case of 

 the king of Denmark, they may well have been of silver, or sufficiently 

 ornamented with silver, to be spoken of as though made of that metal. 

 Our own King James I., who was a great sportsman, made fishing with 

 cormorants quite a fashionable amusement. He had a regular estab- 

 lishment for these birds on the Thames at Westminster, and, to meet 

 the requirements of the day, created a new office, "Master of the Royal 

 Cormorants." See " The Ornithology of Shakespeare," pp. 260-265. 

 As to the use of the "collar" or "strap," the reader may be referred 

 to Freeman and Salvin's "Falconry: its claims, history and practice," 

 to which are added remarks on training the otier and cormorant, 

 pp. 327-350. ED. 



1 In a note to this passage in his edition of the present work, the late 

 Mr. Blyth observed that the nightingale " appears to migrate almost 

 due north and south, deviating but a very little indeed either to the 

 right or left. There are none in Brittany, nor in the Channel Islands 

 (Jersey, Guernsey, c.) ; and the most westward of them probably 

 cross the Channel at Cape La Hogue, arriving on the coast of Dorset- 

 shire, and thence apparently proceeding northward rather than dis- 

 persing towards the west, so that they are only known as accidental 

 stragglers beyond at most the third degree of western longitude, a line 

 which cuts off the counties of Devonshire and Cornwall, together with 

 all Wales <and Ireland, and by far the greater portion of Scotland, in 



