56 
ANATIM. 
land, or to fresh water, as other marine birds in that case do. 
Their nearest approach to land known to me was during the night 
of a hurricane, when a great number remained on the Long 
Strand, within half a shot of the fields bordering the bay : — they 
were known to do this only in the one instance.* 
Although they may occasionally feed by night, such is not their 
habit : they are day-feeding birds. When a south-east wind 
drives them towards the Antrim side of the bay, they may 
sometimes be seen with the naked eye busily feeding, and in so 
doing, dipping half the body under water, and exhibiting, con- 
spicuously, the white under plumage from the legs to the tail. They 
likewise feed while walking on the Zostera banks, left bare by the 
falling tide. In seasons when there was a continuance of easterly 
winds, opportunities were daily afforded during several weeks in 
spring, of observing great flocks of brent geese going through 
all their evolutions within about three shots of the road which 
borders the bay on the western side, and at a distance of from one 
and a half to two and a half miles from town. A railway embank- 
ment, constructed within the last few years, has, however, shut 
out this prospect ; and fields of corn now wave where banks of 
Zostera then prevailed. They fly to the deep water in the after- 
noon, and remain there during the night. At sunrise — not before 
dawn, like the wigeon — they commence flying to their feeding- 
grounds, at which time, particularly in March and April, they 
were formerly shot at low water by fowlers, using ordinary guns, 
and having their small boats in the creeks. These men required 
to be cautious of exposing their countenances, as the “ human 
face divine” alarmed the birds much more than the body of the 
shooter. Many brent geese were commonly thus killed before 
swivel-guns came into use, but that mode of shooting has since 
been rarely followed. Another method, chiefly practised late in 
* Mr. R. Davis, jun., writing from Clonmel, in 1842, remarked ; — “ One of 
these birds was shot in our river by an uncle of mine some fifty years ago.” A 
friend of Mr. J. Poole’s (as noted in his journal in January 1848) informed him that 
“ he once shot a brent goose from the bridge of Enniscorthy, a town nearly twenty- 
five miles up the Slaney. A heavy snow-storm, which made it impossible to discern 
objects at any considerable distance, may account for these geese finding their way 
such an unusual distance from the sea.” 
