4 Animal Life 
insects are in adhering to a particular sort of locality, and finding several species of 
moths otherwise found only on the coast abounding in the Breck, some thirty miles 
or more from the nearest sea, feel justified in regarding them as the survivors of 
the littoral fauna of an ancient sea coast. 
The geologists are undoubtedly right in stipulating for the presence of marine 
shells, but while this would be definite and convincing, the occurrence of these coast 
insects in a locality so far imland is one of the shreds of evidence afforded by the 
geographical distribution of living forms which assist in unravelling the history of the 
changes the earth’s surface has undergone. 
In a locality. where the surface has so long remained undisturbed one would 
naturally expect to’ find some indication of pre- -historic human inhabitants, and this 
frequently occurs in the form of flint arrow-heads picked up among the surface-flints 
of the hills; it must have been a vast workshop for the old stone-folk who dwelt 
there—a wealth of material and consequent waste of the result. The stone-folk have 
gone, but not their occupation, for there are still living at Brandon some of the old 
“flint-knappers”’ who, if they are not so now, were up to very recent times celebrated 
for the manufacture of gun-flints. 
It is, however, with the birds which inhabit the Breck that this article has to 
deal, and there is at least one otherwise exclusively coast species which in the 
nesting season regularly visits the district; this is the ringed plover, or ringed dotterel, 
one of the commonest of our resident shore birds. It is quite possible that as the 
large flocks which have wintered on the more southern shores break up and move 
northward in the spring, pairs settling here and there along the Norfolk coast, while 
the majority pass across to Lincolnshire and the north, a certain number, following 
the lime of coast as it turms into the Wash, continue westward till they lose the 
sea at King’s Lynn, and crossing the twenty-five or thirty miles of Norfolk heaths, 
find the sandy sohtudes of the Breck sufficiently like the sea shore to suit the 
requirements of their nesting operations, spread over the hills and sandy fields from 
Brandon to Mildenhall, and find themselves as much at home for the time as ‘if 
they could hear the swishing of the tide as it creeps over the broad sands of the 
Wash thirty miles away. They leave in the early autumn with their young families, 
and it may be that the latter, with the controlling principle of the instinct of 
migration, returning again the following spring to the place where they were reared, 
have so established a regular visitation. 
This theory is quite independent of the supposed littoral omgin of the Breck ; 
if we connect the occurrence of the ringed plover with that hypothesis, it is only 
by regarding the individuals who spend their breeding seasons there now as the 
descendants of the ringed plover which inhabited the Breck in the remote period 
when it was an actual sea shore. It is a contemplation fascinating im the extreme, 
in that it deals so intimately with the mysteries of hereditary habits—very pleasant 
to dream and theorise, especially so if standing on one of those sandy flint-flecked 
hills on a warm June day, watching the ringed plovers as they skim low over the 
ground, sometimes lost to sight as their white under-parts blend with the white flints; 
and listening to their shrill cries so reminiscent of the shore. One needs but to close 
one’s eyes for a time and hear the soft wind soughing through the fir trees, sounding 
so like the murmuring of the sea and blending so naturally with the cries of the 
ringed plovers, that. one almost expects on looking up to see tiny wavelets creeping 
over the rippling sand and a blue haze joing sea and sky in the distance. 
Ringed plovers’ nests are common on most of our coasts, and are mere hollows in 
the shingle and pebbles of the beach; the four pale stone-coloured eggs, speckled and 
streaked with brown and black chiefly at the large end, assimdate most remarkably with 
