BIRDS AND THE GREAT SNOW. 83 



sometimes wading through deep snow-drifts, with many a slip 

 and stumble — for the undulations and sudden breaks of the sand- 

 dunes were hardly traceable — and I finally reached the shore. 

 A few out-flying Turdidcs and Finches passed over me as I 

 floundered through the snow, but, when I reached the beach, I 

 found Thrushes, Fieldfares, Eedwings (in particular), Larks, 

 Linnets, Pipits, Twites — and, indeed, insessores of all kinds, 

 even including Goldfinches — flying due south, following the 

 coast-line. Silently, like brown ghosts of birds, they flew — hour 

 after hour — thousands upon thousands ! I wondered whence 

 they were trooping, and whether but for stress they would have 

 still set at defiance the promptings that impelled many of their 

 relatives two months ago on their migration southward. Surely 

 these were they who had landed in Scotland, and would have 

 stayed there! Bunches of five, ten, twenty, fifty straggled and 

 struggled along — odd birds, fagged right out — alighting now and 

 then to rest awhile. They passed almost within arm's length, 

 many of them, and their line of flight lay between the sea-licked 

 edge of the snowy plain and low-water mark, over a clear ribbon 

 of sand some fifteen yards in width. The silent hosts opened on 

 either side of me, as might a regiment of infantry, as I walked 

 north ; they did the same as I came back homeward, slightly 

 closing their formation as they proceeded ahead of me. Unfor- 

 tunately the morning was gloomy, and my trusty Zeiss glasses 

 a little too powerful for their nearness ; so that the smaller 

 hosts, had they contained rarities, would have passed on un- 

 identified. I longed to have my smaller " operas," but no gun, 

 for I abominate that spirit which leads to the slaughter of hosts 

 of little migrants for the sake of (reputedly) adding a new species 

 to a county's fauna. I would rather spend half my life among 

 the mud-flats, and not know that some rare and new species of 

 wader was watching me daily, than know and name it, if it meant 

 my taking away the life it is as much entitled to as I am to mine ! 

 Here the ichthyologist, however sentimental, scores, for all rare 

 and most common fishes are more or less caught by accident/ He 

 may sit all day long for years angling from a rock, seeking in 

 vain a Balistes capriscus, and to-morrow it may be cast up on the 

 shore by the scornful sea ! 



The poor Black-headed Gulls fared badly enough ; they left 



h2 



