300 Wild Lifein a Southern County. 
ing. It may possibly be connected with the pheno- 
menon of ‘packing ;’ for they seem to go away by 
twos and threes, to disappear gradually, but to return 
almost all at once, and in parties or flocks. The 
number in the flocks varies a great deal: it is a com- 
mon opinion that it depends on the weather, and that 
in hard winters, when the cold is severe and prolonged, 
the flocks are much larger. Wood-pigeons are seldom, 
it is said, seen in great flocks till the winter is: 
advanced. 
Has the date of the harvest any influence upon the 
migration of birds? The harvest in some counties. 
is, of course, much earlier than in others—a fact of 
which the itinerant labourer takes advantage, follow- 
ing the wave of ripening grass and corn. By the time 
they have mown the grass or reaped the wheat, as the 
case may be, in one county, the crops are ripe in 
another, to which they then wend their way. 
One of the very earliest counties, perhaps, is Surrey. 
The white bloom of the blackthorn seems to show 
there a full fortnight earlier than it does on the same 
line of latitude not many miles farther west. The 
almond trees exhibit their lovely pink blossom; the 
pears bloom, and presently the hawthorn comes out 
into full leaf, when a degree of longitude to the west 
the hedges are bare and only just showing a bud. 
Various causes probably contribute to this—difference 
of elevation, difference of soil, and so forth. Now the 
spring visitors—as the cuckoo, the swallow, and wry- 
