LOCAL MIGKATIONS. I05 



month in the year, the greater number of our birds are col- 

 lected in flocks in the open country, the villages only retaining 

 the ordinary blackbirds, thrushes, robins, etc. The winter 

 migrants are in great numbers in the fields, but they and almost 

 all other birds will come into villages and even into towns in 

 very severe weather. In February, villages, orchards, and gar- 

 dens are beginning to receive more of the bird population, while 

 the great flocks are beginning to break up under the influence 

 of the approach of spring. In March the same process goes 

 on more rapidly; the fields are becoming deserted and the 

 gardens fuller. But meanwhile hedges, woods, thickets and 

 streams are filling with a population from beyond the seas, 

 some part of which penetrates even into the gardens, sharing 

 the fruit-trees with the residents, or modesty building their 

 nests on the ground. As a rule, though one of a very general 

 kind, it may be laid down that our resident birds prefer the 

 neighbourhood of mankind for nesting purposes, while the 

 summer migrants build chiefly in the thickets and hedges 

 of the open country ; so that.just at the time when chaffinches, 

 greenfinches, goldfinches, and a host of other birds are leaving 

 the open country for the precincts of the village, their places 

 are being taken 'by the new arrivals of the spring. Or if 

 this rule be too imperfect to be worth calHng a rule at all 

 (for all the swallow kind but one British species build in 

 human habitations), it is at least true that if a garden offers 

 ample security for nesting, the proportion of residents to 

 migrants taking advantage of it, will be much greater than 

 in a wood or on a heath. 



