VI 
INTRODUCTION. 
of the caged Turtle Dove, Nightingale, or Whitethroat during the period at which, were they free, they 
would be leaving our shore ; once let that period be passed, their efforts cease, and apparent resignation to 
their prison ensues. “ It sometimes happens,” says Mr. R. Gray, “that Swifts, obeying their unconquerable 
instincts, will at the close of a stormy season desert their unfledged young, and leave them to perish of 
hunger. Late breeds especially are subject to this unnatural desertion. Oftener than once I have seen the 
little round sooty faces of the young ones peering out of their holes and plaintively crying for food, after 
which they have crept hack to die. In these very nests, on the return of another season, the same old birds 
have been known to rearrange their building-materials, a few straws being merely laid over the bones of the 
abandoned to receive a new family.” 
It is a matter of surprise to some persons, as indeed it may he to the most astute philosopher, how such 
frail little birds as the Chiffehaff’ and its allies can cross the sea from France or Portugal without exhibiting 
any very apparent signs of fatigue ; yet we know that they do so, and moreover that a still smaller species, 
the Goldcrest {Regulus cristatus), effects a much longer passage when crossing the German Ocean in its 
migration from the opposite parts of the Continent. I must not omit to mention, however, that occasionally 
hundreds of these diminutive birds are found in an exhausted state in the early morning on the Northum- 
berland and Norfolk coasts ; and in support of this I may quote here a very interesting passage from the 
work of the late gifted Mr. Selby, which runs thus : — “ On the 24th and 25th of October 1822, after a very 
severe gale, with thick fog, from the north-east (but veering towards its conclusion to the east and south- 
east), thousands of the Goldcrests were seen to arrive upon the seashore and sandbanks of the Northumbrian 
coast, many of them so fatigued by their flight or j)erhaps by the unfavourable sbift of the wind, as to be 
unable to rise again from the ground ; and great numbers were in consequence caught or destroyed. The 
flight must have been immense in number, as its extent was traced through the whole length of the coasts 
of Northumberland and Durham. There appears little doubt of this having been a migration from the more 
northern provinces of Europe (probably furnished by the pine-forests of Norway, Sweden, &c.), from the 
circumstance of its arrival being simultaneous with that of large flights of the Woodcock, Fieldfare, and 
Redwing.” 
Woodcocks, we know, generally arrive in fair condition on our north-eastern shores at dawn, with a wind 
that is either easterly or within a point or two of that direction ; but should the wind shift after their flight 
has commenced, the increased muscular effort required lands them on our coast In an exhausted and 
emaciated state. Assuming, however, that birds, both great and small, luwe availed themselves of a 
favourable slant of wind, no great amount of muscular effort would be requisite, inasmuch as those arriving 
from the south will require little more than an hour to cross the Channel, while the passage of the German 
