127 



THE SAND-MARTIN. 



Cotile riparia (L.). 



The Sand-Marfcin arrived along the whole of the south coast, 

 but chiefly to the west o£ Hampshire. The actual arrivals 

 were not well recorded, and the birds seem to have passed very 

 rapidly inland^ so that fresh immigrants were frequently 

 reported from inland counties without any corresponding 

 increases being noticed in the coastal areas. There is no 

 reason for thinking, however, that there were any consider- 

 able immigrations eastward of Hampshire prior to the 3rd of 

 May, and it is practically certain that the eastern half of 

 England was partially populated before that date by immi- 

 grants that had spread overland from the south-west. The 

 earliest records were of five or six birds in Devonshire on the 

 25th of March and a passing flock of twenty or thirty in the 

 same county on the 27th, while on the following day two 

 were seen in Wiltshire. Up to the 13th of April the records 

 refer to stragglers, chiefly in Wales and the south-west, with 

 outlying ones as far north as Cumberland on the 10th, and 

 as far east as Surrey and Bedford on the 12th. A small party 

 seems to have landed in the west on the 15th ; but the first 

 arrival in numbers was not recorded until the 18th and 19th. 

 The western part of these immigrants, which landed in Devon- 

 shire and Dorsetshire, seems to have passed mainly along the 

 Welsh border to Cheshire and Yorkshire ; while the eastern 

 wing that landed in Hampshire passed through Surrey ana 

 Hertfordshire into the eastern Midlands and East Anglia. 

 A second immigration seems to have taken place in the same 

 area on the 23rd and 24th, reinforcing the numbers in North 

 Wales, the western Midlands and Yorkshire on the one hand 

 and the eastern Midlands on the other, Cumberland and 



