A hazy moonless night, with a sou’-easterly breeze and drizzling rain--given these conditions, at this season of the year we have numerous visits of various birds, members of the autumnal migratory flight. Making straight for the light, they dash themselves against the heavy plate-glass of the lantern; many of them are thus killed and swept by the wind into the sea. Others, again, arrive with more caution, and though taken in the hand and thrown clear of the tower invariably return, and remain fluttering against the glass till daylight reveals to them the futility of their exertions in that direction. The most numerous of these visitors are the redwings and fieldfares, but blackbirds, larks, starlings, wheatears, finches, tits, etc., may be met with in the course of the season. It is somewhat startling, when on watch in the lightroom, to hear the thud with which they strike. The woodcock, owing to his rapid flight, strikes hardest of all, and the other extreme is met with in the smallest of our British birds, the tiny gold-crested wren, whose presence on the lantern is announced by a feeble tinkling sound, which a robust butterfly might easily imitate. The heavier birds do not always strike with impunity; instances have occurred where ducks have gone clean through the lantern to the derangement of the revolving gear of the light, the splintered glass bringing the machinery to a dead stop. An incident of this nature happened a few years ago at Turnberry Lighthouse, on the Ayrshire coast, the intruder in this case being a curlew or whaup. A storm-pane is considered a necessary adjunct to every lightroom, and is always held in readiness to be shipped in case of such emergency. At some shore stations it is customary on the approach of a favourable night, during the migratory period, to keep the cats indoors to prevent them mangling the expected catch. In one particular instance the birds collected of a morning filled an ordinary clothes-basket, and a few nights later included five wild geese, which were secured out of a large flock that came to grief on the dome.