THE WOODCOCK. 237 



and east or west winds, according to the season, are believed by 

 the people of the district to regulate the time of their coming 

 and going. " When they gather in numbers previous to leaving 

 the country in spring (and long after they have left the covers) 

 they are to be met with under the large loose stones of the moun- 

 tain." This account is very similar to that of Sir John Cullum, 

 on the autumnal and vernal appearance, &c, of the woodcock on 

 the coast of Sussex, contributed to the second volume of Pennant's 

 ' British Zoology/ 



With respect to the western coast of Ireland, Major M'Uwray, 

 of Westport, informed me in 1840, that a friend and he had 

 often, at the migratory periods, shot from twenty-two to twenty- 

 five brace in a few hours about Bundoran, on the coast of 

 Donegal. When in Achil, in June 1834, I learned from Lieut. 

 Reynolds, R.N., of the Coast Guard Service (who had been a few 

 years stationed there), that he had met with woodcocks on that 

 island as early as the 10th of October, but that they are most 

 numerous from the 1st to the 20th of November,* and again 

 from the middle of February to the end of the first week in 

 March : the most he had killed at such times in a day were 

 sixteen brace ; he had not uncommonly bagged fourteen or fifteen 

 brace. f Some remain during the winter in Achil, though the 



* Montagu, in the Supplement to his ' Ornithological Dictionary,' gives, on the 

 authority of Captain Latham, a similar account of woodcocks in Portugal— that they 

 are very plentiful in the month of November, when he has killed fourteen or sixteen 

 couple in a day's shooting ; they become scarcer as the winter advances, and plentiful 

 agaiu in the beginning of March, on their return northward : they therefore move 

 still farther south than that country. The partiality of this bird to the extreme 

 west, as Ireland and Portugal, is also mentioned by Montagu ; but Sir Humphrey 

 Davy states, that " in the woods of southern Italy and Greece, near marshes, they are 

 far more abundant [than in Ireland], and they extend in quantities over the Greek 

 Islands, Asia Minor, and northern Africa." — ' Salmonia,' p. 333. Mr. H. E. 

 Strickland informs us, that " so abundant were woodcocks at Smyrna during the 

 severe weather following the Christmas of 1835, that many were killed in small 

 gardens in the midst of the town." — ' Zool. Proc' 1836, p. 101. But as to the 

 actual numbers obtained by sportsmen in the Morea, see the concluding extract from 

 Mr. Lloyd's paper a few pages farther on. 



f Captain Manley has informed me that once when he was at Holyhead (Wales) 

 a person living there went out to shoot woodcocks, expecting them to have arrived 

 on their autumnal migration, and was not disappointed, having returned in two hours 

 with about eighteen or twenty brace : the next day they were all gone. When that 

 officer was stationed at Malta a flight of woodcocks came, and great numbers were 



