326 } THE ZOOLOGIST. 
the navigable rivers were “laid” across, and afforded excellent 
skating. 
The shore-gunners had now the best of it, for whether flooded 
or frozen out, the feathered denizens of the broads and sur- 
rounding marshes had pretty well disappeared, excepting the 
Ducks, which in large numbers sat huddled up upon the ice in 
the daytime, far out of gun-shot, though at “flight” time exposed 
to a sharp fusillade as they sought their nocturnal feeding 
grounds. Coots had gone to the salt marshes, Waterhens dis- 
persed over the uplands to turn up, here and there, in the most 
unlikely localities, while those too enfeebled by cold, or otherwise 
too crippled to leave their accustomed haunts, fell vicims to the 
Hooded Crows. The Snipe also sought inland springs, or, if not 
leaving us altogether, tarried awhile on the coast; and so also the 
Woodcocks, which, if sparsely sprinkled about inland, were in 
some localities plentiful enough by the sea. The few decoys still 
worked, and especially those on Fritton Broad, near Yarmouth, 
fared well throughout the season; and neither the severe weather 
before Christmas, nor even the noisy onslaught of marsh gunners 
thinning their ranks nightly, when the decoy “rose,” seemed to 
drive the Ducks from their quiet retreat by day; though the open 
water in the “pipes,” and the cunning of the decoy-man and his 
confederates—the trained dog and decoy ducks—lured many to 
destruction. 
I am indebted to my friend Mr. Bellin, of Yarmouth, for the 
following return of wildfowl received by one, only, of the game- 
dealers in that town, between the 14th and 28th of December, 
which, in variety and numbers, takes one back almost to old 
times, when, as recorded by Messrs. Paget, in their ‘“ Sketch 
of the Natural History of Yarmouth,” Isaac Harvey, who then 
received the bulk of the birds killed in that neighbourhood, had 
brought to him on one market day, in the winter of 1829, “no 
less than four hundred wildfowl of different descriptions, five 
hundred Snipes, and a hundred and fifty Golden Plover.” 
Wildfowl, Waders, &c., received from Dec. 14th to Dec. 21st, 1878. 
Full Snipe - - - : - 447 
Jack Snipe - - - - 21 
Green and Golden Plover — - - - 206 
Grey Plover - - - - 3 
el ee Be 
