1G4 
NATURAL HISTORY 
At present I do not know anybody near tlie seaside that 
will take the trouble to remark at what time of the moon 
woodcocks first come ; if I lived near the sea myself, I 
would soon tell you more of the matter. One thing I used 
to observe when I was a sportsman, that there were times 
in which woodcocks were so sluggish and sleepy that they 
would drop again when flushed just before the spaniels, 
nay, just at the muzzle of a gun that had been fired at 
them ; whether this strange laziness was the efiect of a 
recent fatiguing journey, I shall not presume to say. 
Nightingales not only never reach Northumberland and 
Scotland, but also, as I have been always told, Devonshire 
and Cornwall. In those two last counties we cannot 
attribute the failure of them to the want of warmth : the 
defect in the west is rather a presumptive argument that 
these birds come over to us from the continent at the nar- 
rowest passage, and do not stroll so far westward.^ 
Trotton and his friend mistook it for a duck on account of its webbed 
feet. Cormorants, as is well known, were formerly trained for fishing 
purposes, and wore collars, usually it is true of leather, but in the case of 
the king of Denmark, they may well have been of silver, or sufficiently 
ornamented with silver, to be spoken of as though made of that metal. 
Our own King James I., who was a great sportsman, made fishing with 
cormorants quite a fashionable amusement. He had a regular estab- 
lishment for these birds on the Thames at Westminster, and, to meet 
the requirements of the day, created a new office, "Master of the Royal 
Cormorants." See " The Ornithology of Shakespeare," pp. 260-265. 
As to the use of the "coUar" or "strap," the reader may be referred 
to Freeman and Salvin's "Falconry: its claims, history and practice," 
to which are added remarks on training the otter and cormorant, 
pp. 327-350. — ^Ed. 
^ In a note to this passage in his edition of the present work, the late 
Mr. Blyth observed that the nightingale " appears to migrate almost 
due north and south, deviating but a very little indeed either to the 
right or left. There are none in Brittany, nor in the Channel Islands 
(Jersey, Guernsey, 6cc.) ; and the most westward of them probably 
cross the Channel at Cape La Hogue, arriving on the coast of Dorset- 
shire, and thence apparently proceeding northward rather than dis- 
persing towards the west, so that they are only known as accidental 
stragglers beyond at most the third degree of western longitude, a line 
which cuts off the counties of Devonshire and Cornwall, together with 
all Wales and Ireland, and by far the greater portion of Scotland, in 
