THE SNIPE AND ITS NESTING=HAUNTS. 
Written and Illustrated with Photographs by WinuIAM FARREN. 
F all imfluences which tend to make changes in, or destroy the natural fauna of 
a country, the most effective is the slightest alteration or modification of the 
character of the country itself. 
Probably the greatest change that has been made, and the one that has had 
most effect on the natural fauna, has been the drainig and cultivating of the 
Cambridgeshire fens. 
If we have had the opportunity of witnessing that now rare occurrence, a fen flood, 
we can better imagine what it was like when, every winter, the water lay over the land 
like a huge lake, the dead feathery reed-tops, and occasional tree-stumps and sallow 
bushes peering above the water, serving as landmarks to show the whereabouts of the 
higher land and the edges of the meres, where thousands of wild fowl congregated 
and wintered, findmg there a feeding-ground and sanctuary only occasionally broken by 
the fenmen and their long-barrelled punt guns. 
Then in the spring, when the waters subsided, what a breeding-ground it was! 
Large reed-frmged meres and inaccessible bog land and swamps, covered with sedge, 
rushes, meadow sweet, loose-strife, and other fen plants almost rank in their luxuriance. 
The swans, geese, and many of the duck family betook themselves to thei northern 
breeding-haunts, while to the species which inhabited the fens all the year round, such 
as coots, grebes, moorhens, water rails, snipe, mallard, and teal, was added a mighty 
gathering of summer visitors; ruffs and reeves in great numbers; the black tern (which 
even now, although never stopping to nest, linger about the fen rivers on their summer 
migration northwards, as if in obedience to an impulse which prompts them to seek 
for the now vanished meres, once the annual nesting-haunts of hundreds of their 
species) ; redshanks, godwits, and some the very names of which as British breeding- 
birds sound to the ornithologist of to-day like some ancient myth; bitterns and avocets; 
even perhaps the spoonbill, all found for themselves and their young an inexhaustible 
food supply, together with the safety of an isolation such as was to be found in no 
other part of England. With these came ground-nesting birds of prey, short-horned 
owls, hen, marsh, and Montagu’s harriers, the last three levying toll on the snipe 
and smaller wading birds, earning their name of “harriers” by even taking the eggs 
from the nests. 
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