birds, the accurate Yarrell, recorded the figure eighty as the number we were led to expect?[1] So it was with alight heart we bade our conductor lead on. Pursuing a winding grassy path, which led through some reed and osier beds, and traversing an extensive secluded morass, in part high and dry, and in part slushy, our guide pointed out the now-vacated nests, which were scattered thickly enough over the surface; indeed almost every available spot seemed occupied with one. These nests were composed of straw and flags, about a barrowful to each nest, and as these are washed away by the winter tides, loads of straw are supplied in March, and shot down in heaps, from which the Swans, regularly returning to the same nesting-places every year, appropriate to themselves what they require, and arrange it to their own satisfaction. There had been over three hundred nests, he told us, last spring.
Then we came to the margin of the water, and in that part of the Fleet just opposite I counted over fifty Swans, while some few were basking in the sun and preening their feathers on the Chesil Bank on the other side, and many more might be discerned in the far distance, sailing or at rest in the Fleet towards the east. They would all come back, the keeper said, in the early morning, to drink at the freshwater stream which here falls into the Fleet; but they would not come to shore to revisit their nesting-places till next March. Indeed the old birds, he assured us, come but very little to shore at this season of the year. Occasionally a very few will land on the Chesil Bank for awhile; and sometimes others will take wing and make short flights around; but the main body lives, swims and rests upon the Fleet.
Asked whether they could stand very rough weather, the keeper said that the old birds took no harm, however intense the cold or rough the wind; but that the young birds were unable to endure much inclemency of weather. At such times the cygnets nestle under the wings of their parents, who thus protect them with the best shelter they can afford, but notwithstanding all their care the young Swans are often killed by severe storms and cutting winds and intense cold. The climate of the coast of Dorset would never indeed be very rigorous; but it is notorious that the Mute Swan is much less hardy than the Hooper, and while its congener braves the severity of northern winters, Cygnus olor retreats to the
- ↑ Yarrell's ' British Birds,' vol. iii., p. 315 (3rd edition).
