SPRING MIGRATION IN THE HUMBER DISTRICT. 41 1 



on the 17th; and Yellow Wagtails (M. rail) on the same day. 

 Many Fieldfares up to the last week in April, almost daily, moving 

 from the interior towards the coast. 



On the night of the 27th the wind backed to the south-west, 

 and on the next morning, before the sun had melted the hoar- 

 frost from the grass, Cuckoos were shouting all over the country. 

 On the foreshore of the Humber I found one to two hundred 

 Knots, chiefly grey birds, some flushed underneath with pale 

 chestnut, but only one really red amongst them. On the other 

 hand, a large flock of large-sized Dunlins were all in complete 

 summer plumage. 



Although almost daily on the look-out, I did not see a 

 Wheatear on the Lincolnshire side of the Humber before the 

 early morning of May 2nd, and this was one of the large race 

 which visits us in the late spring, perhaps then on passage to 

 Greenland, where they arrive early in the month. It flew into 

 the thickest part of a rough old thorn growing on a drain-bank. 

 There are ornithologists to whom this little wanderer of the early 

 spring is but Saxicola cenanthe, male or female, as the case may 

 be, duly labelled and put away in the drawer of a cabinet for 

 comparison with skins of its fellows from other lands ; but to 

 those who are annually in the habit of watching for the bird, on 

 its arrival it is something more than this, — a charming vision of 

 contrasting black and whites, with delicate shadings of pearl-grey 

 and warm buff ; its presence invariably suggestive of nature wild 

 and uncultivated, open warrens and moorlands, silent glens or 

 stone-strewed mountain slopes, and surf-beaten skerries and 

 islands in the northern seas. Its summer range is extraordinary, 

 extending over Central and Northern Europe and Northern Asia, 

 on the one hand, crossing Behring's Straits into Alaska, and on 

 the other, a summer visitor to Spitzbergen, Iceland, and Green- 

 land. On May 5th there was a great inrush of small migrants, 

 Wheatears, Whinchats, Willow Wrens, and Whitethroats ; of the 

 two former very considerable numbers. On the Humber muds, 

 Grey Plovers, Godwits, and Knots ; but none of these in very 

 advanced plumage. On the grass-lands a few Whimbrel, the first 

 of the season. On May 8th, with an unusually low ebb, I could 

 only find one Curlew and a solitary black-breasted Golden Plover 

 on the foreshore. 



On the 10th, wind N., heavy cold rain, one of the marsh 



