6 THE. AUDUBON BULLETIN 
The gulls were back in numbers at Calumet when I visited there March 
29. At Wolf lake we saw a very dark phased snowy owl, a common loon, 
redhead ducks, canvas-back, scaup, American golden-eyes, and two bald- 
pates, besides large numbers of ducks so far out that we could not identfy 
them. At Jackson park outer harbor the harlequin was still there with 
greater and lesser scaup, golden-eyes, and red-breasted mergansers. Two 
hooded mergansers were in the lagoon east of Wooded island. 
6335 S. Kimbark ave., Chicago 87 
ft ft 
Birds in a British Summer 
By ALFRED C. AMES 
WHEATEAR. — GOLDCREST — blue tit — lapwing — pied wagtail — these are 
not least among the sights that Britain offers the tourist 
From mid-July to early September, 1949, I was an enchanted first time 
visitor in Great Britain. Bird watching was a constant if minor pursuit 
throughout my travels in the island of England-Scotland-Wales — travels 
that took me as far north as Braemar on the Dee, as far south as the Sussex 
Downs, west to Oban and to Anglesey, and east to Canterbury. Through- 
out, an alertness to birds added greatly to the interest and satisfaction of 
an itinerary drawn up quite independently of birds. 
My list of species, almost all encountered casually and incidentally, came 
to 50, nearly all new to an American observer. As is true of other aspects 
of British life, British birds offer constant novelty without overwhelming 
alien strangeness. Some few birds are the same as those at home — at least 
to the extent of binomials. It was good to see common terns in large numbers 
flying under the Firth of Forth bridge as the sun set and darkness gathered 
at Queensferry, to see my only British creeper along a lonely road west of 
Braemer, to see our barn swallows skimming over the lawn at Dryburgh 
Abbey (as lovely a spot as there is in Scotland). Home birds that are ex- 
citingly uncommon here are even more exciting against a foreign back- 
drop. I remember especially a great flock of turnstones flashing low over 
Conway bay, east of Beaumaris. 
England’s only wren, our winter wren, scolded me as I passed too near 
a vine-hung cliff on the Isle of Arran. I got a glimpse of her, we two the 
only living creatures in sight in that particular spot, just around the 
corner from Lochranza. Two names long known to me only in the pages 
of books materialized for me: the magpie and the wheatear. Several mag- 
pies flashed into view on the ridge of Costorphine hill, just above Edin- 
burgh zoo. My first good look at a wheatear, at a distance of only a few 
feet, came at a psychological moment. I was plodding along, drenched and 
weary after an hour-long rain in shelterless, barren Kirkstone Pass in 
Westmoreland, when there it was, friendly and unmistakable, on a road- 
side stone fence. All the way down the new foot path from the pass to 
Brothers Water, wheatears were constantly appearing and disappearing. 
Birds I saw again and again included the robin, the pied wagtail, the 
martin (smaller than ours, with a white rump), and the lapwings. The 
English robin, as domestic as ours and more winsome, hopped about under 
