COUNTRY LIFE
A GREAT success is being reaped by the Council for the Encouragement of Field Studies. Students of all sorts, and all sorts of ages, delight to attend the four centres that are now in being, and they are enabled to concern themselves with any or all departments of open-air science: the weather and the rocks as well as birds, beasts, insects and flowers. The hostels have been well chosen and are well directed. The scheme will extend and will be wholly self-supporting if its nature is widely enough understood. The latest of the four centres, at Dale Fort on Milford Harbour, which as yet has been perhaps least widely bruited, should achieve an international 'reputation at least among ornithologists. It includes the island of Skokholm (not, alas, also the larger island of Skomer), which was made famous by Mr. Lockley, and is familiar to readers of The Spectator whose generosity built the famous ringing cage. From Skokholm is being repeated the experiment in the migration of shear-water. The sitting birds are carried off to distant places and released, while expectant watchers wait for their return home. A par- ticular point that needs elucidation is whether they return with the same ease and punctuality from the far north as they returned from the yet farther east. The nesting habit and habitat of the shear-water make identification of individual birds particularly easy.
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