56 ANATID^. 



laud, or to fresh water, as other marine birds in that case do. 

 Their nearest approach to laud known to me was during the night 

 of a hurricane, when a great number remained on the Long 

 Strand, within haK a shot of the fields bordering the bay : — they 

 were known to do this only in the one instance.'^ 



Although they may occasionally feed by night, such is not their 

 habit : they are day-feeding birds. When a south-east wind 

 drives them towards the Antrim side of the bay, they may 

 sometimes be seen with the naked eye busily feeding, and in so 

 doing, dipping half the body under water, and exhibiting, con- 

 spicuously, the white under plumage from the legs to the tail. They 

 likewise feed while walking on the Zostera banks, left bare by the 

 faUing tide. In seasons when there was a continuance of easterly 

 winds, opportunities were daily afforded during several weeks in 

 spring, of observing great flocks of brent geese going tlirough 

 all their evolutions within about three shots of the road which 

 borders the bay on the western side, and at a distance of from one 

 and a half to two and a half miles from town. A railway embank- 

 ment, constructed within the last few years, has, however, shut 

 out this prospect ; and fields of corn now wave where banks of 

 Zostera then prevailed. They fly to the deep water in the after- 

 noon, and remain there during the night. At sunrise — not before 

 dawn, like the wigeon — they commence flying to their feeding- 

 grounds, at which time, particularly in March and April, they 

 were formerly shot at low water by fowlers, using ordinary guns, 

 and having their small boats in the creeks. These men required 

 to be cautious of exposing their countenances, as the " human 

 face divine" alarmed the birds much more than the body of the 

 shooter. Many brent geese were commonly thus killed before 

 swivel-guns came into use, but that mode of shooting has since 

 been rarely followed. Another method, cliiefly practised late in 



* Mr. R. Davis, jun., writing from Cloumel, in 1842, remarked; — "One of 

 these bii'ds was shot in our river by an nucle of mine some fifty years ago." A 

 friend of Mr. J. Poole's (as noted in his jomnial in January 1848) informed him that 

 " he once shot a breut goose from the bridge of Enuiscorthy, a town nearly twenty- 

 five miles up the Slaney. A heavy snow-storm, wliich made it impossible to discern 

 objects at any considerable distance, may account for these geese finding their way 

 such an lumsual distance from the sea." 



