193 AN ILLUSTRATION 



territory, is the one spot on earth the bird knows — 

 every hill, wood, stream, tree, bush, every grass, is 

 intimately known to him: his feeding and recreation 

 grounds, his safe roosting-place, his shelters and 

 refuge from inclemency of weather and all dangers, 

 are there, and outside of its limits it is all a strange 

 world, and he a stranger in it. He will cling to his 

 home even when persecuted, and robbed year after 

 year of eggs and young; and even when it is destroyed, 

 as when new land is brought under cultivation, and 

 when forests are cut down or blasted by fire, he will 

 continue to haunt the spot, as if unable to adapt 

 himself to new and different surroundings. 



Among the notes (and there are hundreds of them) 

 recording my observations during my early years on 

 what I called the "Passion of Migration," there is one 

 in which I compare the autumnal migration of the 

 birds to thistledown as I used occasionally to see it. 



The cardoon thistle, a big plant which in my time 

 covered hundreds of square miles of the plain in my 

 district, has a very large flower, twice as large as 

 that of the artichoke, which it resembles, and the 

 down it produces is correspondingly large. In the 

 late summer, at the end of January, on a windy day 

 the sky was often seen full of the great silvery float- 

 ing globes of down. When the wind fell they would 

 settle on the earth in such abundance that the whole 

 plain would be thickly sprinkled over with them, 

 so that it would have a misty or downy appearance. 

 I have sat on my horse on a calm hot day in late 

 summer viewing the plain, burnt yellow after the 



