ECCENTRIC BIRDS.
What has happened to the birds ? Details of every sort of novelty of habit are recorded day after day. I said something last week of the quantity and variety of duck on London waters, which have equalled the fainous ponds at Tring. The Thames has been hardly less attractive—and to strange birds, including red-breasted Merganser and goosander. On the borders of Bedfordshire some of the furrows behind the ploughs are now
white with gulls, which are fast developing the inland habit. Even bramblings, those finches from the North have descended upon open spaces in London suburbs, and hoodie crops have been quite a common spectacle in the South. Southern observers have seldom reaped so various a harvest, and resident birds are behaving oddly. Delight in the warm weather that followed the abnormal cold has so intoxicated the rooks in my neighbourhood, that they have taken to loud and tumultous activity at midnight, as if they had mistaken the moon for the sun. Will the immigration of spring visitors, already begun, show similar eccentricities ?
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