NATURE NOTES FROM MABLETHORPE. 
By \V. Percival Westell, F.R.H.S., M.B.O.U. 
O those people who nowadays sojourn at this rapidly 
rising Lincolnshire seaside resort, and who, like the 
writer, may perchance be interested in the fauna and 
Hora of the district, there is a good deal of wild life 
which, to the casual observer, or the lay man, might easily pass 
unnoticed. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that, however barren 
and desolate any neighbourhood may at a casual glance appear to 
be, when one comes to note down the various birds, wild flowers 
and other forms of wild life to be heard or seen, one’s lists 
rapidly total up, and even a few days’ stay may result in quite 
a batch of interesting and useful Nature notes being gathered 
together. 
Residing, as does the writer, in an extremely well-wooded 
part of quiet, homely Hertfordshire, beloved by dear old Izaak 
Walton and Charles Lamb, the sudden transformation to treeless 
Lincolnshire is, to say the least, striking, and the country around 
presents quite a barren aspect. On immediate arrival the field 
naturalist, or the general lover of Nature and country life, thinks 
of the curlews of Locksley Hall with 
“ The dreary, dreary moorland and 
The barren, barren shore.” 
As regards the bird life of the neighbourhood, it is only fair 
to state that the month of August is not an ideal one in which to 
observe birds to any extent. By that time parental cares and 
affections are mostly concluded; most birds have lost their voices 
and will not tune their lutes until the dawn of another spring- 
time ; several species have by August quitted our shores for 
their sojourn under sunnier skies, and with the resident birds 
the moulting season is rapidly approaching, and many species 
hie away to some convenient solitude, there to don new dresses 
with which to court their lady loves another season. Yet, in 
spite of this, the birds which I was enabled to identify were very 
few indeed, and the chief branch of Nature study to which the 
field naturalist should devote attention is the flora. 
To deal with the bird life, one should perhaps in the first 
instance give pride of place to the cosmopolitan sparrow ; that 
cheeky, impudent, and so universally despised bird about whose 
depredations so much has been said and written during the last 
few years, and as to which the Board of Agriculture itself has 
recently issued a mandamus advocating the formation of sparrow 
clubs throughout the country ! The advocacy of this is open to 
question, but this does not come within our province here. 
One notices with pleasure the number of swallows, house- 
martins and swifts, and, moreover, the way in which the resi- 
dents protect and encourage the martins to nest under the eaves. 
Another feature of the bird life hereabouts was the number 
