BIRDS
The striking geographical position of Cornwall gives a peculiar interest to the study of its bird life. It naturally emphasizes many phenomena of distribution, and causes the omissions from the seasonal bird population of the county to become in many cases as interesting as the inclusions. It makes the county the theatre of complicated migratory movements, and consequently the recipient of many waifs and strays. It has caused it to become a gathering ground for many migratory species in the autumn where they may linger for days, or even weeks, before moving to their winter quarters in the south.
It confers on the county a remarkably mild and genial climate, that by its influence on food supply, particularly during autumn and winter, naturally attracts the more nomadic species, and adds to the charm of everyday field work the joy and excitement of the unexpected. As the first and last land in England Cornwall offers the first shelter to autumn migrants that after getting beyond the mouth of the Channel are driven back by storms and contrary winds; and the last asylum to birds that during the winter are driven south or west by the severity of the weather, and are either unwilling or unable to make the passage to the Continent.
A cursory examination of the physical features of the county shows that in its diversity of soil and covering, and its happy admixture of land and water, Cornwall is pre-eminently adapted for a most varied ornis. Its 250 miles of coast, its projecting headlands, its rocky islets, and its famous western archipelago, its long sea-walls of seamed and fissured cliff broken by delightfully sheltered combes, its well-watered, well-wooded valleys running down to the sea, its wide and varied beaches, its open bays, its branching estuaries and tidal rivers, its long reaches of sandy dunes, its breezy downs and stretches of heath-land, its magnificent furze-brakes, its wild moorland, its wealth of upland valleys and shady wooded streams, its lofty tors and granite cairns, its high-lying bogland and desolate marshes, its brackish and freshwater pools, its low-lying reed-beds and swamps, its orchards, gardens, woods, its many grades of cultivated land—all these together offer a congenial habitat for every type of British bird. As might be expected, therefore, Cornwall is rich in resident species, and most of the sections are well represented. On account of its position in the extreme south-west, however, there are several noteworthy absentees from its list of breeding birds. Not only does it lie outside the breeding area of such species as the pied flycatcher, lesser redpoll, wryneck, long and short-eared owls, merlin, golden plover, black-headed gull, and stone curlew, but it is too far west for the nesting of the lesser whitethroat, the nightingale, and the hawfinch, and yet the three breed regularly in the sister county, Devon. The yellow wagtail probably only occasionally ventures across the Tamar to nest, and in the county itself we come across the western breeding limit of the redstart, garden warbler, wood-wren, and tree-pipit, all of which are practically confined to the woods of the Tamar valley. Up till
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