BIRDS Lancashire is rich in respect of its bird life. It forms one of the larger counties of England, possessing an extensive sea-board, and is well endowed with mountain and plain, with wood, river, and lake. It can consequently present to the ornithologist a very representative series of species in the majority of the avian families, and in most districts numerous individuals of each. Situated, however, in the north and west of England, its position is less favourable for receiving visits from the stream of migratory birds passing to and from the continent of Europe than the eastern and southern counties, where so many tarry for a time every spring and autumn. In general, the entire coast of Lancashire from the mouth of the river Duddon to the estuary of the Mersey is fronted by an enormous expanse of sandbanks, hundreds of square miles in extent, left dry by the sea at low water. In Furness, the country landward of the high-water mark forms a plain several miles in width, which rather abruptly rises to an altitude of over 2,500 feet in Furness and Dunnerdale fells. The whole district is rich in tracts of wild crag, elevated moorland and forested slopes, with abundance of brakes and timbered parks interspersed amid the extensively cultivated low- lands and the upland grass farms. In this portion of the county also occur the largest stretches of fresh water. Lake Windermere, Coniston and Esthwaite Waters, and numerous larger or smaller tarns. Many rare species of birds, therefore, survive in the seclusion of this safe sanctuary, and hosts of water- fowl find here unmolested nurseries. Within its boundaries still breed the merlin, the wood warbler, the dipper, the raven, the carrion crow, the great and lesser spotted woodpeckers, the hen-harrier, the white-tailed eagle, and the peregrine falcon. To Furness appertains Walney Island, which has long been noted as one of our chief safe nesting places for terns and limicoline birds. At the southern extremity of the island there is situated the largest of the two important gulleries in the county, the other being that on Cockerham Moss on the south-eastern shore of Morecambe Bay. Leigh, the historian of Lancashire in 1700, remarks that there were there vast quantities of sea-gulls : ' in the breeding time the whole island is near covered with eggs or young ones, so that it is scarce passable without injuring them.' In the list of rare visitors to Walney Island, the Duddon Sands, or the adjacent bay of Morecambe, occur the names of the barnacle goose, the scaup, the redbreasted merganser, the avocet, the whimbrel, and the eared grebe. During autumn and spring on migration, and in winter — especially if severe weather prevail — thousands of ducks, geese, swans, curlews, and dunlins find these sands an inexhaustible feeding ground. The coast between Morecambe Bay and the boundary of Cheshire is indented by the estuaries of the Lune, the Wyre, the Ribble, and the Mersey. The greater part of the long sea line of this region is fringed with sand dunes varying from one to four miles in width, and from 20 to 189
