Country Life
MIGRANTs.
It has not perhaps happened before within our memory that March weather, however leonine, has routed migrating birds.
Our winter visitors, of course, especially fieldfare and redwing, travel further south in obedience to greater cold ; but this year on the continent, if not in England, flocks that started on their journey were driven back again by frost and snow in conjunction : they failed altogether, for example, to make the passage of the Alps. The mortality in many species, especially larks, was terrible ; but we may hope that the later warblers may have escaped. Most of our native English birds were marvelously unaffected. I never knew the chaffinch to sing earlier in such volume ; and personally I found only one sign of suffering among the birds. Redwings in the Home Counties were either so weak from hunger (and they are the most sensitive of all our birds, in my experience) or so blinded that they fell victims to the new electric wires, which our own birds for the most part successfully avoid. I hope that some, at least, recovered from the fall. I picked up one and left it in a warm tuft of grass and nurse the con- fidence that the sun revived it. It is hard. to persuade oneself whether kindness consists in happy despatch or an attempt to save.
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