1903 The Great Black Woodpecker 139 



found, on examination by Mr J. H. Gurney, to be due to 

 misconception, confusion with other birds, and even some- 

 times to fraud ; but there is a residuum that cannot be 

 explained away in this wholesale fashion. Any one can 

 satisfy himself of this by examining the list given by Mr 

 J. E. Harting in his ' Handbook of British Birds.' One 

 cannot help thinking that it is, to say the least of it, unlikely 

 that so many observers could have been mistaken. Nor is 

 the bird an easy one to mistake. Its colour, its habits, its 

 cry, are all distinctive. 



But the case for the Great Black Woodpecker does not 

 rest only upon the cases examined by Mr J. H. Gurney and 

 pronounced wanting, whereby this species has been igno- 

 miniously expelled from the pages of Yarrell, Saunders, and 

 others. 



In Mr Bull's ' Birds of Herefordshire' we have a record of 

 this bird from two competent observers — the late Captain 

 Mayne Reid, who saw two Black Woodpeckers near his 

 residence at Ross, and the late Rev. Clement Ley, who 

 twice saw the bird. The first occasion was at Ruckhall 

 Wood, Caton Bishop, about 1874. Mr Ley was a thor- 

 oughly good ornithologist who knew this particular bird in 

 its haunts abroad, and on this occasion he pointed it out to 

 his cousin, Mr Edw. du Buisson. Again in 1876 at Mount 

 Edgecumbe, in Devonshire, hearing the loud note of the 

 Black Woodpecker, he remarked to his companion that if 

 they remained quiet they might see the bird. Accordingly, 

 standing close to a thick oak coppice, they soon got a good 

 view of it. Is it not absurd to brush aside this evi- 

 dence of an expert ? One of the sceptics would no doubt 

 have gone for a gun and murdered the poor creature, without, 

 however, persuading any other sceptic that the bird was a 

 genuine British specimen, not escaped from an aviary, or 

 purchased in Leadenhall Market. I unhesitatingly express 

 my conviction that the bird seen on this and the former 

 occasion was Picus Martins. 



Take next the evidence of Mr E. Cambridge Phillips in 

 his ' Birds of Breconshire.' On Whit-Monday 1885, he 

 says, " I heard a bird's note most startling, loud, and reson- 

 ant, quite unlike anything I had heard before, in forty years, 



