358 HIHUNDINID.E. 



boy, will serve its ends as well as a lofty precipice. It has 

 some of the adaptiveness of its relatives. In Norway it will 

 make its nest in the turf-roof of a hut, and in England 

 it has been often knoAvn to breed in holes in old walls.* 

 Dr. Norman Moore tells us, in his life of Waterton (p. 125), 

 how that ingenious naturalist fitted more than fifty holes in 

 a walled bank with draining-pipes, that they might form 

 nesting-places for this species, and that the year they were 

 completed every hole was tenanted. But perhaps a more 

 singular case still is that, discovered by Mr. E. Bidwell (Zool. 

 s.s. p. 5108), and confirmed by Mr. Upcher, of its breeding 

 in some numbers in huge heaps of sawdust near Brandon. 



The young are fed with gnats and other small insects, 

 and, sometimes, according to White, with dragon-flies almost 

 as long as themselves. When they leave the nest they sit 

 for a time on any convenient perch, and are so unsuspicious of 

 evil that they may be easily taken by the hand. A little later 

 they fly with their parents, from whom they receive food on 

 the wing, the act being so rapidly performed that it escaped 

 his observant eye. Afterwards, like other species of the 

 family, they get their own living, chiefly over the surface of 

 water, and roost in swarms on the trees or among the 

 vegetation at its side. The notes of this species are quite 

 inexpressible by any combination of letters. The most 

 ordinary is a low complacent chirp, which is quickly changed 

 to a loud and angry cry on the approach of danger. The 

 cock has a very gay, twittering song, commonly delivered on 

 the wing near the nest. At least two broods are hatched in 

 the course of the season, but the Sand-Martin leaves this 

 country earlier than either of its allies. Towards the end 

 of August, the numbers at its breeding-places *are visibly 



* White mentions its breeding in the scaffold-holes of an ancient building at 

 Bishop's Waltham, and the like has been noticed in the crumbling mortar of old 

 walls at Godstow by two observers (Zool. p. 7S-44, and s.s. p. 2344) — the latter of 

 whom, Mr. C. B. Wharton, " found a nest about a foot down a hole in the gnarled 

 stem of an elm tree, which itself grows out from beneath the masonry." Mr. 

 Ilarvie Brown in Scotland saw numbers of the species flying into and resting in 

 holes in an old wall, though he could not be sure that they nested there {op. cit. 

 p. 897), while Mr. Prior, near Bedford, had proof of the fact (Zool. 1877, p. 450). 



