It is well known that woodcocks follow certain routes to their favorite feeding grounds in the evening, as they also have preferences for certain woods and certain parts of woods to lie in during the day. In short, they are very peculiar and fanciful in their tastes, and are guided by circumstances not apparent to us in their liking for one place rather than for another which seems to our eyes to offer the same advantages. A wood above my father's late house, in Northumberland, was a regular passing place for cocks, and at dusk on any April or May evening a sight of half a dozen at least was a certainty, as they passed rapidly above the trees, announced, long before they themselves were visible, by their peculiar half squeak, half whistle. I have here seen them "tilting" in the air in the manner described by St. John and others. It has been suggested that this tilting (at which time they tumble and twirl about in the air in pairs and threes, apparently prodding at one another with their bills) is connected with pairing, but I can not think so, as I have witnessed it as late as the end of May. I rather think it is pure playfulness, as of children just out of school, after lying concealed and quiet most of the day. According to Yarrell (1871), woodcocks sometimes become exhausted and fall into the sea on their migrations; but they do not always perish, for he says: A woodcock when flushed on the coast has been known to settle on the sea, and when again disturbed rose without difficulty and flew away. Numerous instances are recorded of woodcocks alighting on the decks of ships in the English Channel and elsewhere. The rapidity of flight of this bird is at times so great that a pane of plate glass more than three-eighths of an inch thick has been smashed by the contact, and one was actually impaled on the weather cock of one of the churches in Ipswich. _Fall._--Mr. Slater (1898), writing of the fall migration in Great Britain, says: