Snipe breed in the Bollin meadows, and common sandpipers were always by the river and the river-bed as long as there was any water at all in it, always at least in August. They still seem to remember their old haunts, and visit us occasionally. In the latter part of August, 1910, there was one that had some feathers out of place in one of its wings and appeared unable to fly. He seemed content enough and I wondered if he would try to face the winter here, but whether by his own act and deed, or by someone else's, he had gone when I looked for him in September. In August, 1911, a sandpiper used to frequent a pit in fields a good way from the river. In April and May, 1910, a pair of redshanks were constantly to be seen in the Bollin meadows towards Dunham, but no nest was found. In 1911 they were there again, and the keeper found a nest not far from the Fox-cover, but I think he must have told too many of his friends about it, for within a week of the eggs being hatched it was deserted. I very well remember a good many years ago, though I can find no note of the exact year, that I saw a black tern flying backwards and forwards like a swallow over a wet spot in the corner of the garden, and the next day I saw what was probably the same bird flying in the same way over a large farmyard pit close by the road, about a mile from here. Since the Ship Canal has been opened gulls have been among the most frequent and the most noticeable of all birds in these parts. Whenever a field is ploughed up, however far it may be from the canal, there you are sure to find gulls, and when the plough is at work in the fields opposite, which are close to its banks, the gulls come in crowds and form one long white line as the furrows are turned, the birds continually rising before the plough and settling down again when it has passed. I have identified black-headed and lesser black-backed gulls among them, but have never attempted to decide to what species the majority belong. Indeed, I do not feel very competent to do so, having always found it sufficiently difficult to distinguish the variations of gull plumage at different ages and at different times of the year. In 1908 the keeper (Mr. J. Porter) showed me a Bohemian waxwing, a hooded crow and a hobby, all of which he had shot in Warburton within a year or two previously. He has told me since of stockdoves ("blue rocks" he calls them) nesting here, and a curious story of a wren's nest on an ash-stump in the Fox-cover in 1910, on the top of which a hedgesparrow built her nest. Both broods, he said, hatched about the same time.