MIGRATION OF WOODCOCKS. 
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species. Having said thus much, we think some light may 
he thrown upon this obscure subject, by examining the above 
facts, and comparing them with some others, which are equally 
well known about Woodcocks. 
In the first place, their lean, poor, and often scurfy con- 
dition, is not owing to exhaustion from length of flight ; 
because, not only those which are found on the eastern coast, 
are usually very weak and reduced, hut even those which are 
killed in Norway, before the migration has taken place, are 
found to he already in an emaciated state, and infested with 
vermin. In a short time, however, after frequenting their 
favourite haunts in our country, they become fat and plump, 
and then, as the season advances, they usually fall off, and 
the flesh of those that have been accidentally met with in 
the Summer is found to he hard and dry. That their fatigue 
may he the consequence of this previous debility is therefore 
not improbable : hut it is not the cause. We will next touch 
upon their first appearance on our western instead of our 
eastern shores. It is a generally prevailing opinion that the 
state of the moon has much to do with the arrival and 
departure of Woodcocks ; hut more experienced naturalists 
have remarked that the wind, and not the moon, determines 
the time of their arrival, which is usually in misty weather, 
during the northerly or easterly winds. Supposing then that, 
about dusk, — and we know that the migrations of Woodcocks 
usually, if not invariably, take place at night — a flight of them 
starts from Norway, with a sharp northerly or easterly wind 
helping them, in adding to the natural velocity of their own 
most rapid flight, which has been estimated at one hundred 
and fifty miles per hour, — high up in the air, as we moreover 
know they fly, — the land below them, when they had crossed 
the Channel, would be invisible, and, borne upon the breeze, 
by the time they had continued their flight till early dawn, 
where would they he ? Look to the map, and we shall find 
them, after their flight, at the rate of one hundred and twenty, 
or one hundred and fifty miles per hour, far away to the 
westward of Ireland, hovering over the Atlantic, steering for 
America ; and that they are found at sea, we learn from the 
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