VOL. VI.] NOTES. 187 



WHITE-SPOTTED BLUETHROAT IN SUSSEX. 



On the afternoon of September 22nd, 1912, Mrs. E. D 

 Compton, of " Summerfields," St. Leonards-on-Sea, found 

 a small bird lying dead on the floor of her drawing-room. 

 Seeing that it appeared to be something unusual, she sent 

 it the next day to be stuffed. It turned out to be an im- 

 mature male Bluethi'oat, and it seems probable that it must 

 have been caught by a cat, as the right half of its tail is 

 missing. The bird has completed its first autumn moult 

 and the silky-white patch above the lower blue of the gorget 

 is quite well marked. On one side of the white spot there 

 are two or three faint rusty flecks, but the spot itself is so 

 evident that in spite of the great variation that is found 

 in the gorget of young autumn Bluethroats, and the great 

 difficulty and often impossibility of assigning a specimen 

 to a definite race, I have little hesitation in the present 

 instance in recording the bird as a specimen of the Central 

 European form [L. svecica cyanecida). " Summerfields " is 

 a large house standing in its own grounds in the centre of 

 the town. N, F. Ticehurst. 



BIRDS BREEDING IN OLD NESTS. 



On a triangular nesting-bracket, fixed some fifteen years ago 

 under a projecting beam outside my house, about eight feet 

 from the ground. Spotted Flycatchers regularly bred for 

 many years ; then a pair of Swallows took possession of the 

 shelf, and after adding a mud front, nested there. The 

 next year a pair of Wrens built a nest of leaves filling up 

 the whole space of the shelf. The following year a pair of 

 Swallows built a nest, partly upon the shelf, and the follow- 

 ing winter the Wrens' nest fell to pieces and disappeared. 

 Since that date (two years ago) Swallows have regularly 

 nested and brought up broods of young on the shelf. Another 

 pair of Spotted Flyc atchers have nested this year on a bracket 

 only six feet from the ground. Another nesting- bracket on 

 this house has been almost continuously used by Spotted 

 Flycatchers for upw ards of twenty years. 



John R. B. Masefield. 



RETURN OF MARKED SWIFTS AND HOUSE-MARTINS 

 TO THEIR BREEDING-PLACES. 



In British Birds, Vol. V., p. 165, I quoted the interesting 

 results achieved by Herr A. Gundlach and Ritter von Tschusi 

 in proving that marked S^vifts returned to the same nesting- 

 places. Two adult SA\ifts {Apus a. apus) marked at a 



