BIRD MIGRATION DOWN THE THAMES
On September 16, 1896, after a period of very stormy wet weather, I saw a
great migration of swallows down the Thames. It was a dark, dripping
evening, and the thick osier bed on Chiswick Eyot was covered with wet
leaf. Between five and six o'clock immense flights of swallows and martins
suddenly appeared above the eyot, arriving, not in hundreds, but in
thousands and tens of thousands. The air was thick with them, and their
numbers increased from minute to minute. Part drifted above, in clouds,
twisting round like soot in a smoke-wreath. Thousands kept sweeping just
over the tops of the willows, skimming so thickly that the sky-line was
almost blotted out for the height of from three to four feet. The quarter
from which these armies of swallows came was at first undiscoverable. They
might have been hatched, like gnats, from the river.
In time I discovered whence they came. They were literally "dropping from
the sky." The flocks were travelling at a height at which they were quite
invisible in the cloudy air, and from minute to minute they kept dropping
down into sight, and so perpendicularly to the very surface of the river
or of the eyot.
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