44 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



exercises, but came across the sky to drift and sag down 

 among the cattle. They were obviously migrants, and 

 this was corroborated by further detachments flying from 

 north to south to join the main body, until there must 

 have been nearly two thousand birds picked out against 

 the ground like a field of black flowers. The birds were 

 tired out, and kept straggling in, dragging a heavy and a 

 weary oar, and dropping with relief into the cool pastures. 



Larks, too, were beginning to collect into their autumn 

 bands. One day I saw about thirty of them within 

 a quarter of a mile, feeling one another's presence as 

 it were, tasting the sense of contact before signing the 

 bond of association. The songs of these larks were 

 very interesting. The birds rose up from fifty to seventy 

 feet, and there hung suspended, fluttering their wings 

 and throwing out slow, laboured and disjointed notes — 

 frozen stalactites rather than a cascade of melody. 

 Occasionally, the superb trill leaped out of this toil 

 and tangle of guttural chords only to fall and be lost 

 among them again. The curious painfulness of the whole 

 performance reminded one of nothing so much as an 

 academy of music. Certainly there was nothing rapturous 

 nor unpremeditated here : these were pupils of the lark 

 school, not blithe spirits and " etherial pilgrims." I 

 hardly attempt to explain this, since, though the year 

 was at the fall, larks in full voice were occasionally to 

 be heard. I can only surmise that this was a party of 

 birds collecting for partial migration. The young had left 

 their grassy cottages and gone into the world ; the sun 

 had climbed so far above them that he could not warm 

 them, much less they visit him ; the Norfolk larder was 

 running bare, and the east wind getting into their throats.^ 



A curious feature of the flats is the variety of inland 

 birds which visit them in the autumn, either on partial 

 migration or on foraging expeditions, or simply, as it 

 appears, for a change of air and locality. The population 

 of shore as well as inland birds is even more shifting, 

 and this great open waste may be likened to a railway 

 junction or a busy seaport which is a place of call on a 



* The reason, I expect, was a physiological change corresponding 

 with the change in the seasons. 



