508 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
birds, the accurate Yarrell, recorded the figure eighty as the 
number we were led to expect?* So it was with a light heart 
we bade our conductor lead on. Pursuing a winding grassy path, 
which led through some reed and osier beds, and traversing an 
extensive secluded morass, in part high and dry, and in part 
slushy, our guide pointed out the now-vacated nests, which were 
scattered thickly enough over the surface; indeed almost every 
available spot seemed occupied with one. These nests were com- 
posed of straw and flags, about a barrowful to each nest, and as 
these are washed away by the winter tides, loads of straw are 
supplied in March, and shot down in heaps, from which the 
Swans, regularly returning to the same nesting-places every year, 
appropriate to themselves what they require, and arrange it to 
their own satisfaction. There had been over three hundred nests, 
he told us, last spring. 
Then we came to the margin of the water, and in that part of 
the Fleet just opposite I counted over fifty Swans, while some few 
were basking in the sun and preening their feathers on the Chesil 
Bank on the other side, and many more might be discerned in the 
far distance, sailing or at rest in the Fleet towards the east. They 
would all come back, the keeper said, in the early morning, to 
drink at the freshwater stream which here falls into the Fleet; but 
they would not come to shore to revisit their nesting-places till 
next March. Indeed the old birds, he assured us, come but very 
little to shore at this season of the year. Occasionally a very few 
will land on the Chesil Bank for awhile; and sometimes others 
will take wing and make short flights around; but the main may 
lives, swims and rests upon the Fleet. 
Asked whether they could stand very rough weather, the keeper 
said that the old birds took no harm, however intense the cold or 
rough the wind; but that the young birds were unable to endure 
much inclemency of weather. At such times the cygnets nestle 
under the wings of their parents, who thus protect them with the 
best shelter they can afford, but notwithstanding all their care 
the young Swans are often killed by severe storms and cutting 
winds and intense cold. The climate of the coast of Dorset would 
never indeed be very rigorous; but it is notorious that the Mute 
Swan is much less hardy than the Hooper, and while its congener 
braves the severity of northern winters, Cygnus olor retreats to the 
* Yarrell’s ‘ British Birds,’ vol. iii., p. 215 (3rd edition). 
