with sea-weed left high and dry at ebb-tide. It is with us during the entire year, for when the old birds go inland in spring, the young birds take their place and remain for the summer. As long as the young birds remain on the moors and pastures, their food consists of berries, insects, spiders, worms, and snails, and they then become excellent for the table; but after feeding near the sea, they become unpalatable. Its plumage, mottled, speckled, and cut up with broken tones of brown grey white and light red, makes it look like a Plover when squatted, unless its long scythe-shaped bill can be detected,--a most difficult matter when in that position. It is wary in the extreme; morning, noon, and night on the alert. That it is brought to bay at times is certainly no fault of its own, but is mainly due to its surroundings. The Curlew is a most interesting bird, see it when you may, on some upland with the sheep, in the grass meadows, or on the shore, when huge dark storm-clouds roll in from open water, a gale blowing, and the white parts of its plumage showing like large snowflakes as the bird and its companions are driven shrieking and wailing in all directions, or in the calm, still days of early autumn. “From a fishing smack,” says “A Son of the Marshes,” I have watched it probing for lug-worms, running nimbly or walking sedately on the mingled sand and ooze. Curlews allow themselves to be blown, or drifted only, when waiting over some favourite feeding-ground, before the tide has sufficiently left for them to feed. I have repeatedly watched mobs of them, waiting for the tide, when a heavy gale has been blowing. The birds know that their food is just below them so they merely flap to and fro and put up with the inconvenience of being blown about. At any other time they would shoot clean through in the teeth of the gale. Only those who have seen a frightened Curlew go up or down a creek lined with shore-shooters, shrieking as it flies, can form any idea of the bird’s swiftness. I have known a bird of this kind “fly the gauntlet” for three miles, and there has been bang! bang! bang! from every shooter that it passed, good shots too. It escaped the lot without being touched. Swift flyers at all times, their ordinary speed is as nothing compared with what it is when they are frightened.” The Curlew is 24 inches in length. It has a long scythe-shaped bill, a long neck, and long, waders’ legs. The plumage is marked with hemp-seed speckling, the specks somewhat elongated, here and there arrow-shaped. Tail white, slightly tinged with brown; every feather has brown bars. Eye brown. It does not usually nest with us, but is more a spring and autumn visitor; yet it sometimes happens that a pair of these birds build and rear their young. In its northern home it builds on the ground, on the moorlands. It lays four pear-shaped eggs, as large as those of the farmyard duck, of an olive green colour, with dark speckling. THE COMMON REDSHANK.