MIGRANT ROBINS 265 



is always, whatever the season, supreme or unique in 

 autumn and early winter. The South and West excel in 

 spring, especially in the eyes of the bird-watcher ; for 

 the first line of migration for the early arrivals since the 

 first wheatears and first swallows pass through Hamp 

 shire and Somerset to Gloucester and Cheshire. That is 

 one of the favourite routes for our summer visitors. The 

 winter visitors, or some classes of them, have an almost 

 exclusive preference for the East Coast. Every year 

 Norfolk observers see hordes of larks, crows, rooks, 

 starlings, plover, fieldfare, redwing and many others de 

 scend on the coast or fly along it on the last stage of their 

 journey across the North Sea. On occasion you may find 

 the little golden-crested wrens swarming like summer 

 bees and so tired that they pay little or no attention to 

 man or beast. The woods are suddenly populous with 

 woodcock and the marshes with snipe. Many of these 

 birds become more characteristic of the West, especially 

 the woodcock and the wrens, which for myself I espe 

 cially associate with a Westmorland garden. They travel 

 west ; but this strange spectacle of utterly tired birds 

 dropping near the shore is characteristic of our East 

 Coast. The robins arrived on the wings of a north-east 

 wind, which they had chosen as a woodcock is said to 

 choose the full moon ; but if it could help them over the 

 water it could not save them from fatal weariness. 



The host of robins, which we regard as one of the least 

 migratory as well as the least gregarious of birds, would 

 seem to indicate that the movements of birds are fre 

 quently not according to rule, so far as any rules can be 

 deduced. Did not Mr. Julian Huxley the other day hear a 

 Redshank that most characteristic of the wading birds 

 flying over his London house. The tribe had recently 

 quite disappeared from its breeding haunts on the East 



