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there were the plovers to look at as they ran over the flats, the snipe to watch in their humming upward flight, and what interested him still more, the redshanks playing their curious antics.

As summer drew near, the butterflies flitted about in the long marsh herbage; some of them were very beautiful, and a few now considered rare were then common enough on the flats.

But the early autumn was his chief time for observation. Then the waders came in flocks from their Northern homes where they had reared their young, to feed on the foreshore again. Comparatively few waders and swimming birds breed in England. Those species that breed here migrate in their season to other countries; and others that breed beyond our seas come over to us again; so that there is a constant stream, so to speak, of countless hosts on the wing, either coming or going.

The plovers kept to the upland pastures, the redshanks and the snipes to the tussocky parts of the swamps, with little runs of water here and there; the ring-dotterels, in pairs, to any bit of shingle on the foreshore. Herons, moor-hens, and rails frequented the swamps, and a few terns dipped over the lagoons.

The latter were not numerous here, for their proper breeding-place was miles away down the coast.

These were the birds Denzil watched in the spring and summer; a limited number, for such as finches and others did not live in the marshes.

In the autumn there was a change; then the dunlins came in thousands on the ooze, many of them with a great part of their beautiful summer plumage still on them. Sanderlings, stints, and knots, too, were there not many of these latter in comparison with the others; but there were mobs of curlews, and they made enough noise too. A few grey plovers and the herons made up the show at this season.

When winter had fairly set in, the boy revelled in and about the bare district; for independently of the wild ducks and the springs of teal, the diving ducks proper drifted alongshore with the black ducks-the scoters from the open sea in rough weather, to feed on the mussels, cockles, and small crabs that were to be found in profusion in the creek. They dived for these; shell-fish in all stages of growth were found there. It was the young tender shell-fish they fed on. By the term diving ducks, we mean pochards, the red-headed pochards or dun bird, and the scaup

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