286 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



preceding and succeeding it — of very hard frost. " One of the 

 consequences was the bursting, under the tender mercies of the 

 frosty temperature, of hosts of the Grouse eggs" on Westerdale 

 moors, and the equally exposed parts of Danby high moors.* In 

 this case the majority of the birds were believed to have nested 

 again, and no loss, excepting a late maturing, occurred. But in 

 glacial approaches these visitations would have been more recur- 

 rent, and probably not followed by sufficiently genial weather. 

 I noticed in the Transvaal, on the high veld at Pretoria, where 

 the so-called winter is a dry season of delightfully temperate 

 days and cold nights and mornings, that now and then a sharp 

 frost supervenes for a few days, or rather nights, with fatal con- 

 sequences to introduced plants, such as young blue-gums, acacias, 

 &c. The only swannery in England is the one at Abbotsbury, 

 near Weymouth, belonging to the Earl of Ilchester, where, in 

 1880, there were upwards of fourteen hundred birds. The severe 

 winter of 1880-81 reduced the number of Swans to about eight 

 hundred, an average which has since been maintained, t Hardy 

 as Books are, " a long frost kills them in numbers, principally 

 by slow starvation. They die during the night, dropping sud- 

 •denly from their roosting-place on the highest boughs of the 

 great beech-trees, with a thud distinctly heard in the silence of 

 the woods."! Darwin estimated that the winter of 1854-55 de- 

 stroyed four-fifths of the birds in his own grounds. § Mr. Board- 

 man, who had great experience with birds in Canada, informed 

 Dr. Leith Adams : "I remember during the cold season of 

 1858-9 that Crossbills and Pine-finches were very numerous, 

 and I procured a large number in February, to see how far the 

 eggs had advanced, and found them nearly as large as buck-shot. 

 Two days afterwards we had a warm shower, then a sudden 

 change to extreme cold, which killed every small native bird in 

 the woods, where we found their bodies in abundance." || Mr. 

 Kearton writes, that in the memorable winter of 1895 great 

 numbers of Grouse perished from starvation on the northern 



* ' Forty Years in a Moorland Parish,' p. 317. 



f ' Roy. Nat. Hist.' vol. iv. p. 337. 



I Jefferies, ' The Gamekeeper at Home,' new edition, 1890, p. 115. 



§ ' Origin of Species,' 6th edit. p. 54. 



|| ' Field and Forest Rambles,' p. 125. 



