^6 From Magazines, &-Ci [isf'jui- 



settled on a low branch of an elm tree. There the wind caught 

 him and almost upset him, but it appeared to have an exhilarating 

 effect : his piping note became louder and fuller, and he began 

 flying from branch to branch, rising higher each time, until he 

 was at the very top of the tall old tree, swayed on his perch by 

 a high wind, and uttering his note with, I imagined, a ring of 

 happiness in it. The point that chiefly concerns us here is, that 

 during the whole time I spent in watching the Bullfinch and his 

 rapid recovery from the debilitating effects of his long months of 

 confinement, no wild bird came near or appeared to take any 

 notice of him. Yet it was a birdy place, as I have said ; there 

 were Sparrows in scores, Starlings, Thrushes, Chaffinches, cruising 

 about in all directions, and Tits and Warblers of two or three kinds 

 moving about in the foliage. And, as in this instance, so it has 

 been in every case when I have set a caged bird free in a spot 

 abounding with wild birds." 



Pectoral Rails in Captivity. — An article by C. Barnby Smith, 

 in the February, 1915, issue of the AvictiUural Magazine, contains 

 the following interesting notes on the Pectoral Rails {Hypotcenidia 

 philippensis) :— 



" When I left home for Iceland early last June, I had what I 

 hoped was a true pair of Austrahan Pectoral Rails nesting in a 

 grass tuft in a small run. One bird was ' sitting like a stone ' 

 on four eggs, and I hoped for good results. Unfortunately, a 

 rat made an inroad during my absence and killed the sitting bird. 

 On my return, I found that, owing to this and other tragedies, 

 things had got rather mixed, and the surviving Rail had been 

 moved into a larger run (about g yards by 16 yards), where there 

 were a lot of other Waders, including another Pectoral Rail. The 

 surviving Rail was sitting closely in a tuft of grass on eggs 

 believed by my man to be six in number. Thinking these eggs 

 were certainly all clear, I somewhat stupidly had the bird frightened 

 off the nest, and gave instructions for the eggs to be put on a 

 table in the potting shed, to present to a schoolboy in due course. 

 When the man went to the nest for the eggs only four were found, 

 although six had previously been seen. As these Rails are always 

 destro5ring their eggs, this was not surprising. The eggs were 

 removed at 9.30 a.m. on Tuesday, 14th July ; at 2.45 p.m. the 

 same day my man heard a chick trying to break through the 

 shell of one of the eggs removed. He at once took all four eggs 

 back to the nest, and then discovered that the two missing eggs 

 had previously been converted into two httle balls of black fluff, 

 and the old bird had taken these chicks back to the nest and 

 was brooding them there. The four eggs were replaced in the 

 nest, and the following morning two more chicks were hatched 

 (the other two eggs being clear). 



" The difficulty of feeding the chicks then commenced. In 

 the first place, it was often most difficult even to fin4''the parent 



