A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE
30 feet in height. Between these dunes and a line drawn roughly from Lancaster through Preston and Wigan to Manchester, Lancashire is practically a level plain undulating eastward, rarely anywhere rising over 400 to 500 feet. Eastward of this line the country gradually ascends through the foot hills and outliers of the Pennine Range to the boundary of Yorkshire. A special feature of the plains is the extensive area covered by peat mosses. In former days these were vastly greater; but now they are less continuous and more isolated. Yet still between the Ribble and the Mersey there is an almost continuous belt, twenty miles in length by some three miles in width, dotted with numerous meres and pools, the remnants of the more extensive water-expanses, some of which nearly equalled Lake Windermere in size, so that at one time the name of Lake Lancashire was given to these lowlands. In like manner the great woods and smaller plantations, still so abundantly preserved, are but the residue of the almost unbroken forest which once clothed this part of England and harboured so many now vanished species of animals and plants. Countless parks, shrubberies and orchards diversify the surface of the county in the midst of cultivated farms or extensive permanent grass-lands. Lancashire, south of the Fells, therefore presents suitable cover and abundant food supply for most species of birds. Still year after year constant drainage, the continuous additions being made to the arable land, and the growth of the population with the demand for wider areas for human habitation, are curtailing and extinguishing these pleasant habitats and driving their feathered tenants to other sanctuaries. Many species are now far less frequently met with than even a few decades ago; some have entirely deserted us with little hope of their ever returning. The little bittern, the hobby, and, it is to be feared, the kite, are lost to us; the honey-buzzard, the bittern, the night-heron and the wryneck are aves rarissimæ; the cross-bill, the chough, the carrion crow, the buzzard, the marsh harrier, the nut-hatch, and the tree-creeper, become rarer every season.
The almost entire absence of shore rocks deprives the county of many of our common sea-birds as breeding species, the majority of which would certainly nest under different conditions, such as the puffin, most of the gulls, the guillemots, the chough, the rock-dove, the cormorant, and the shag. As might be expected, however, from the extent of our maritime sandbanks, our lakes, meres, rivers and the wide river-like ditches cut through the mosses, the number of sea or fresh-water-loving birds is very large. No fewer than seventy-nine can be enumerated either as resident or visiting species, and, as already said, during migration and in severe winters vast flocks congregate on the sandbanks, on the mudflats of the estuaries, and on our inland waters.
Several species have been recorded for the first time as British birds from Lancashire, namely, the black-throated wheatear, the collared pratincole, the sociable plover, the great snipe, the white-faced petrel, and the lanner falcon; while such rarities as Montagu's harrier, the goshawk, the honey-buzzard, the red-footed falcon, the glossy ibis, the spoonbill, and the Siberian thrush, have all been observed or taken in it. Several of these records are becoming ancient history; many of those visitors have not for many years passed this way again. A goodly number of the specimens upon which these records are founded were fortunately acquired by the thirteenth Earl of
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