GKEENSHANK 311 



and actually raising his wing over the hen until at last coition took 

 place. Both birds remained quiet for some little time afterwards 

 and then rose together and flew away, calling all the time. 



Nesting. — The information with regard to the nesting habits in all 

 the older works is of the baldest and scantiest nature, but the last 

 decade has seen a great advance in our knowledge and Mr. N. Gilroy 

 (1922) in particular has published a fascinating little pamphlet on 

 this bird in which his observations on over twenty nests examined 

 between 1906 and 1922 are carefully coordinated, so that now the 

 actions and movements of breeding birds are much better understood. 

 The whole account is of the deepest interest, but as it extends to some 

 twenty pages it is only possible here to give a short resume of the 

 present stage of our knowledge. The greenshank generally nests 

 within easy reach of some small lochan, often a mere pool, to which 

 the young can easily be led by the parents soon after they are hatched 

 out. The nest itself is usually on dry ground. On the treeless moor- 

 lands of Southerland Caithness it is almost always made either close 

 up against or actually on one of the many grey bits of rock lying 

 amongst the heather. Exceptionally it has been found on the top of 

 a hummock, but as a rule should be looked for within a few hundred 

 yards of the feeding ground, sometimes quite exposed but difficult to 

 see as the sitting bird exactly resembles in color the grey stones lying 

 about and generally sits till almost trodden on. In the Inverness 

 country the birds nest close to a mark, just as the Sutherland birds 

 do, but here instead of a grey boulder it is usually a bit of bleached 

 and dead pine, of which thousands of fragments lie scattered about. 

 Exceptionally I have known a bird make use of an iron fence post as 

 a mark. When a bird has been found standing about the edge of some 

 tiny pool the probability is that his mate is sitting not far away, but 

 the difficulty of finding her is vastly increased by the fact that the 

 main feeding ground is generally by the side of a good-sized lake, 

 which may be any distance from one to four miles away, and here 

 one of the pair may spend the greater part of the day. Moreover, it 

 is not uncommon to find that several pairs of birds use the same lake- 

 side as their main resting and feeding ground. Even so, if the sexes 

 changed duties at short intervals or behaved in exactly the same man- 

 ner, it would not be a matter of great difficulty to trace a bird back 

 to its nesting ground. But there seems to be considerable individual 

 variation in this respect. There is, however, a very strong tendency 

 to return to the same breeding place year after year. The classical 

 case is T. E. Buckley's record of a nest found between two stones 

 which was again occupied two seasons later presumably by the same 

 bird, but there are innumerable cases where two or three nesting sites, 

 used in as many years, lie within one hundred yards of one another. 

 This makes the discovery of nests much easier if one can revisit the 



