6o THE DISPERSAL OF SHELLS. 



sandpiper which had a large cockle upon one of its 

 claws and was unable to fly was seen by Mr. D. 

 McNabb, in 1889, on the coast of Queensland/ and a 

 curlew sandpiper with a cockle hanging to one of its 

 toes was shot, a few years ago, as Mr. J. H. Gurney 

 tells me, by Mr. G. Hoare, at Cley, in Norfolk ; a snipe 

 with a large cockle attached in the same way is said to 

 have been shot on the wing in or about 1866,^ and the 

 shooting of a sanderling with a cockle thus attached 

 was recorded in 1872.^ Mr. Gurney tells me that a 

 tern, caught by the foot by a mussel, was found some 

 twenty-five years ago on the Hunstanton beach in 

 the Wash by Mr. F. Cresswell, and that a grey crow 

 with a mussel upon its bill was caught by Mr. 

 C. Springall, in 1888, on the beach at Brancaster. An 

 account, as related by an old hunter_, of the finding of 

 a shoveller duck with an otter's-shell [Lutraria) upon its 

 bill was given by Mr. J. K. Lord in 1865.' Mr. Buck- 

 land (on the authority of Mr. F. Hill^ of Helston) has 

 described the capture of a rail by an oyster ; the speci- 

 mens, of which a photograph was obtained, had been 

 mounted in a case.^ Mr. Norgate tells me that he saw 

 a stuffed water-rail, with its bill in an oyster-shell, at 

 the National Fisheries Exhibition, at Norwich, in 188 1. 



' D. McNabb, " Nature," xlii. (1890), 415. 



' J. B., " Science Gossip," 1866, p. 63. 



3 H. R. Leach, "Zoologist," (2), vii. (1872), 3314. 



* J. K. Lord, " Science Gossip," 1865, p. 79. 



* "Popular Science Monthly," xvii. (1880), 11 1-4, copied from 

 Land and Water.'' 



