266 NOT/EMBER 



Coast ; but who would have suspected that its migratory 

 route would have passed over London ? The waders 

 perhaps, more distinctly than other birds, move on the 

 impulse of weather or the prognostic of weather, and 

 they drift southwards rather than leap in definite bouts, 

 though the hours of their disappearance from Scolt Head 

 or Hickling Broad, or where not, can be foretold with 

 some degree of accuracy. A summer may stay with us 

 long, and its sweetness be drawn out indefinitely even into 

 November ; yet the flight from the North is early, and 

 perhaps numerous beyond the usual. It is many years 

 since I saw so many fieldfares in early November. Some 

 of the robins appeared in September, an inexplicable 

 phenomenon. It is, of course, difficult, not to say im 

 possible, to reckon the hosts of larks and starlings or 

 even crows ; but they are all multitudinous, and the 

 winter larks are in numbers so great as to do serious 

 damage to the small seeds on the Norfolk stubbles. 



The hardest part of the migration puzzle is, perhaps, 

 the movement of species that both nest in England and 

 come to England for the winter. Does anyone know in 

 the very least how far our blackbirds or thrushes or, if 

 they must be now included, our robins are swelled by 

 winter immigrants ? We mark the arrival of sudden 

 hosts of pigeons and starlings (slightly varying from our 

 own birds in plumage) and of the corvine tribe and of 

 plover, both green and golden ; but evidence appears to 

 increase, if slowly, that much smaller detachments of our 

 common native birds cross and recross the narrow and 

 shallow seas of our south and east coasts, not regularly, but 

 oddly and eccentrically in response rather to accidental 

 variations of weather than to any deep-rooted instinct, 

 such as drives the swallow and cuckoo, in blind obe 

 dience to the tide of life that rises within its own being, 



