W. BICKERTON-BIRDS OBSERVED IN 1904. 
227 
east coast estuaries than to corresponding habitats on our western 
shores. In former times, and, in fact, right down to the end of the 
seventeenth century, it was captured in nets and systematically 
fattened for the table. 
It is a noteworthy fact that the nest and eggs of this bird are, so 
far as my reading goes, quite unknown to science, so that even 
in these wise days we do not know exactly everything, even about 
a bird that is extremely plentiful all the winter through on the 
British coasts, and sometimes even, as the present record shows, 
deigns to visit Hertfordshire. 
Its breeding-grounds, however, appear to be chiefly confined 
to North Greenland and Arctic America. On 30th July, 1876, 
Colonel Fielden, naturalist to H.M.S. “ Alert,” first discovered its 
breeding haunts in Grinnell Land in latitude 82° 33' N., where 
he obtained a male and three nestlings near a small lake. Mr. C. 
Hart, naturalist to the sister ship “Discovery,” also captured 
a brood of four on July 11th, and three others on the next day. 
A fine group of these is in the Natural History Museum at South 
Kensington. 
Curiously enough, this bird is practically unknown in those 
regions of Northern Siberia to which the breeding-grounds of 
the previously-mentioned species are confined, while that bird— 
the curlew sandpiper—as already mentioned, is almost equally 
unknown in those northern parts of Arctic America in which 
alone the young of the knot have been obtained. 
In the autumn, as stated, it comes south, and it is found to 
winter in a southern area so enormous as to include Australia, 
New Zealand, Cape Colony, and Brazil. 
One cannot fail to remark, in passing, on the all but amazing 
journeys performed by these two birds in their migratory flights 
of each year. They pass the summer in almost the highest Arctic 
latitudes—the curlew sandpiper in Asia, the knot in America; then, 
their busy time being over, they take a journey of something like 
8,000 to 10,000 miles to reach the quarters where their instinct 
tells them they ought to pass the winter. What a journey it must 
be, especially for the young birds, only three months old, to take! 
And then back again for another 10,000 miles in spring to their 
breeding-grounds. Twenty thousand miles travelling a year, and 
every year, for birds that, even in the adult stage, are only eight 
inches in length in the case of the curlew sandpiper, and only 
ten inches in length in the case of the knot, and whose lengths 
of wing are only 51 and 6 - 5 inches respectively! 
So much for the two newly-recorded species. I have now to 
refer to two birds, each of which has had hitherto only one visit to 
its credit so far as Hertfordshire is concerned. These are the black 
redstart and the black-tailed godwit. 
Black Redstart (Ruticilla titys ).—On 28th February, 1904, 
I started out along the footpath from Watford towards Aldenham, 
and on approaching the new blacking factory which was then being 
built just beyond the railway arches, I was astonished to see what 
