WILD FOWL ON THE COAST.
Cold and bleak lies the salt-marsh, in summer gay with sea-lavender and rose flower-heads of thrift. Yet this is no time to sit at home at ease, but rather to sally forth armed with field-glasses, or, if on destruction bent, with lethal weapons, mindful of the wildfowler's aphorism "the worse the weather, the more the birds."
For the latter are here in far larger number and variety than was the case when winds were soft and skies were blue. As regards some species there is little change. The Black-headed Gulls still paddle restlessly about the tide-edge, screaming querulously, and the Ringed Plover still rise with feeble piping note from the shingle where, until they move, they are as invisible as the common-sandpiper is on a mud bank. Only the graceful terns are gone,—a loss more than atoned for by the arrival of a host of wildfowl from loch and fjord and northern sea. True, the times are not what they used to be, before the birds were harassed by an ever-increasing number of punt-gunners and shore-shooters, or driven from some of their favourite haunts by the vast increase of traffic into and out of the ports and harbours of the east coast. Still when the winter is favourable, i.e., when it brings one or two spells of sharp cold not too long continued, there is something like a return of past glories. Then one may hear again the distant clamour of the wild geese sounding like
