136 
take a trip to Europe in order to write up this 
curious bird as he has written up the buzzard 
of the South. 
The corn-crake is as careless in its general 
habits as it is unmelodious in song. Its nest is 
a curiosity, not of neatness but of untidiness. 
It lays generally four or five eggs, somewhat 
the color of its own dull plumage, but it would 
be a libel to style the place where they are de- 
posited a nest. Not as much as with a single 
straw or feather does this slovenly bird adorn 
the spot in which its eggs are placed. If it 
finds a halt-obliterated cow-track, the eggs are 
laid there ; if no indentation can be found, they 
are laid on the plain surface of the ground, and 
the grass is tramped down about them. The 
young birds come out generally in July, and if 
not able to fly immediately on leaving the shell, 
they are at least able to run. They leave the 
nest the very day they come out of the shell; 
but this is not an uncommon thing, for young 
wild ducks do the same. The corn-crake 
almost invariably builds its nest in meadows, 
and as the young birds are running about in 
the grass when the meadows are being mowed, 
multitudes fall victims to the mowing machine, 
consequently this bird is said to be getting 
scarce, much to the delight of those who live in 
the rural districts and are easily kept awake at 
night. Half a dozen corn-crakes quaking to- 
gether in the same field would prevent any 
easily disturbed person from getting a wink of 
sleep within half a mile of them. 
This bird flies with great difficulty, and 
never to any great distance. Its wings are so 
short in proportion to its size that its power of 
flight is very limited. Any naturalist could 
see by examining it that it could no more fly 
over the British Channel than it could fly to the 
moon. I have frequently hunted these birds, 
and have seen many of them shot, but have 
never known them to fly more than sixty or 
seventy rods. In the face of these facts, a 
writer in the Encyclopedia Britannica has the 
temerity to say that the land-rail is a migratory 
bird, and goes in winter to the interior of 
Africa. Here are his words: ‘It makes its 
way to the shores, if not to the interior, of 
Africa.” ‘It has been known to reach Green- 
land and North America, in every instance, we 
NATURE'S REALM. 
believe, a straggler from Europe or Barbary.” 
Such a grave error as making the land-rail a 
migratory bird is something terrible to find in 
such a book as the Encyclopedia Britannica. 
The writer who made such a mistake must 
have had some other bird in his mind, for had 
-he ever seen a rail of the kind about which he 
was writing, he would have known that it 
would be utterly impossible for a bird formed 
like it to fly across the sea. There never yet 
existed a land-rail of the kind about which I 
am now writing, and about which the writer 
in the Encyclopedia Britannica intended to 
write, that could fly across the channel between 
England and France, a distance of only twenty 
miles in a straight line. Where, then, does 
this bird go in winter, for it is never seen but 
in the summer or early autumn? The answer 
to this question shows one of the most extraor- 
dinary facts in bird life. The land-rail is a hi- 
bernating bird. It never leaves the land of its 
birth, but goes into a hole in the ground and 
passes the winter there. I myself dug one out 
of a smothered-up sewer near our farmyard in 
the winter of 1848. The bird was alive and 
apparently none the worse for its many months 
of imprisonment. It is a well-known fact to 
many naturalists and sportsmen that the Euro- 
pean land-rail hibernates. By no other possi- 
ble means could it preserve its lite, even during 
the mild winters of the British Isles. The 
land-rail is evidently a grub or worm-feeding 
bird ; it does not get its living in the water or 
marshes ; it is not usually seen in swamps, but 
almost always in rich upland meadows. The 
food it lives on is not to be found in winter ; it 
cannot fly to milder climes, and it is only by 
hibernating, or in other words going into a 
hole in the ground, that it can preserve itself 
through the winter. I do not know if it is a 
fact that any other bird hibernates, and would 
like to be enlightened on this point through 
NATURE'S REALM. 
I have never known the land-rail to be seen 
in the fall. It may be that the young birds fly 
in August or September, but I have never seen 
one on the wing later than July. The proba- 
bility is that the young birds do not fly at all 
during the first summer of their lives. They 
can run with great swiftness, and even the old 
