92 Unexplored Spain 
few big ducks then shot being either immature or in poor 
condition, from which it may be inferred that the main bodies 
of all species have passed on to more congenial regions. 
About the 25th September the first greylag geese appear. 
These are not affected by the scarcity of water in any such degree 
as ducks, since they only need to drink twice a day, morning and 
evening, and make shift to subsist by digging up the bulb-like 
roots of the spear-grass with their powerful bills. 
GREYLAG GEESE 
But so soon as autumn rains have fallen, and the whole 
marisma has become suppled with “‘ new water,” it at once fills 
up with wildfowl—ducks and geese—in such variety and prodigious 
quantities as we endeavour to describe in the following sketches. 
WILDFOWL—’EWIXT CuP AND LIP 
Wildfowl beyond all the rest of animated nature lend them- 
selves to spectacular display. For their enormous aggregations 
(due as much to concentration within restricted haunts, as to 
gregarious instinct, and to both these causes combined) are 
always openly visible and conspicuous inasmuch as those haunts 
are, in all lands, confined to shallow water and level marsh devoid 
of cover or concealment. 
Thus, wherever they congregate in their thousands and tens 
of thousands, wildfowl are always in view—that is, to those who 
seek them out in their solitudes. This last, however, is an 
important proviso. For the haunts aforesaid are precisely those 
areas of the earth’s surface which are the most repugnant to man, 
and least suited to his existence. 
In crowded England there survive but few of those dreary 
