NOTES FROM NORFOLK. 331 
occurrences than a meteorological register, and that of the most 
dismal kind. With the exception only of a few mild days in 
February and March, frost and snow, more or less severe and 
deep, continued into May (snow falling heavily in some parts of 
the county on the Ist); and a cold, cheerless June, varied only 
by severe thunderstorms and drenching rain, was followed by 
such a downpour in July as caused floods throughout the county 
scarcely less extensive and disastrous than those of November, 
1878. In a season, therefore, in which the winter overlapped the 
spring and an autumnal summer was succeeded by a more 
summer-like autumn, it is scarcely to be wondered at that our 
resident and migratory birds alike should have suffered from 
weather of so abnormal a character, or that the sportsman and 
naturalist should have had as poor a time of it as the agriculturist 
and the gardener. 
The severe frosts in January only exceeded those of the pre- 
ceding month in duration, and the addition at times of a keen 
searching wind, which reduced most of our resident birds, 
Thrushes, Starlings, Blackbirds, &c., to a wretched state of 
tameness through privation. But though more deaths, I believe, 
occurred from such causes after than before Christmas, the 
remarks made in my supplementary notes for 1878, as to the 
effect of the cold and scarcity of food upon the birds generally, are 
as applicable to the commencement of 1879 as to the close of the 
previous year. The shore-gunners had but a small chance of 
rarities, as the “hard-weather” fowl had passed south with the 
earlier frosts and with the broads and rivers frozen over for weeks 
together, and even portions of the navigable rivers ‘‘ laid” across, ~ 
the marsh-gunners had even less sport. Snipe, Coots, and 
Waterhens had dispersed long before; even the Black-headed 
Buntings had left the reed-beds for the fields and stackyards, and 
the Bearded Tits probably left us for a time, for I neither saw nor 
heard of any. Bird-life in such localities, in fact, was represented 
by the Hooded Crow, everywhere searching for “cripples”; and 
by immense flocks of wild Ducks,* which frequented the frozen 
waters and reed-beds by day, quite inaccessible to the sportsman 
till the evening “ flight,” though the very few decoys still existing 
* An old marshman at Surlingham told me he had never seen such large 
“lumps” of fowl, as on one or two evenings, during the January frosts, left the 
broad for their feeding grounds on the Brundall and Strumpshaw side of the Yare. 
