49 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
report. The most noticeable feature was the great number of 
Robins; there were scores, I think I may say hundreds, of them 
hopping about this out-of-the-way place, which must have formed 
a great contrast to their usual haunts amongst homesteads and 
gardens: they had evidently quite lately arrived, and were resting 
themselves previously to dispersing over the country or moving 
still further southward. I am afraid they were only getting a 
scanty supply of food, for what they could find amongst long 
grass and sand | can scarcely say. In a small walled garden only 
a very few yards square, containing a few currant trees, &c., there 
must have been twenty or thirty of them—native informants said 
fifty at least—searching for food; and in all the ditches and 
hedgerows of the cultivated lands further from the coast, Robins 
were very plentiful. This migration of the Redbreast is not new, 
but I believe an annual occurrence. Last year at this spot they 
were even more numerous. 
The next birds in point of numbers were the Goldcrests, or 
“ Woodcock-pilots,” as they are locally called, and they were 
everywhere; many of them being so exhausted as to be easily 
knocked down with a hat, and numbers might have been caught 
in an ordinary insect-net. Prior to my arrival two Rough-legged 
Buzzards had been shot; I saw one of them, a very fine female. 
There were numbers of Blackbirds, Thrushes and Redwings in 
the neighbourhood, and small parties of the latter were passing at 
intervals all day long. There was this difference in these birds, 
that while the Redwings migrated in small flocks, the Blackbirds 
and Thrushes did so singly or in twos and threes. I saw a Ring 
Ouzel and a solitary Fieldfare, but was told that a flock of about 
fifty of the latter birds had arrived so early as the last week in 
September, and though I told my informant that he must have been 
mistaken, he assured me he was not. 
A few Woodcocks were shot, and there were numbers of 
Short-eared Owls and a single Long-eared one, which latter 
had killed itself against the telegraph-wire. I met two shooters 
who had bagged no less than nine Short-eared Owls for 
“screens”; these were afterwards sent to Mr. Richardson, the 
birdstuffer here, where I dissected several of them, and found 
the stomachs empty in every case but one, and this contained 
the remains of a Blackbird, probably found dead beneath the 
telegraph-wires. 
