WASTE GROUND AND SUBURBAN EIRD-LIFE. 1 25 



usually leaves the country by the middle of August. White of 

 Selborne, who paid much attention to this, declares that they 

 "retire ... by the ioth August, . . . and every 

 straggler invariably withdraws by the 20th." He further writes, 

 " but what is more extraordinary, they begin to retire still earlier 

 in the most southerly parts of Andalusia, where they can be in 

 no ways influenced by any defect of heat; or, as one might 

 suppose, failure of food." Happening to arrive in a Tuscan city 

 on the 1 8th of July, 1890, I was struck with the great numbers of 

 swifts which were flying restlessly about one of the squares there, 

 but it was only in the course of a day or two after my arrival that 

 I realised that they had been congregating for departure, for in 

 that brief space they had entirely disappeared. After the experi- 

 ence of 1890-91 I watched curiously what would transpire in the 

 autumn of 1892. The result was that in that year they continued 

 in large numbers till 19th and 20th August in Polmadie and Lang- 

 side respectively, and at the former locality I saw a pair on the 

 26th of August. There only remains to be further recorded the 

 notable circumstance that the departure of the swift, though 

 delayed in 1891, was immediately followed by a week of remark- 

 ably fine weather, referred to in this paper in the notes on the 

 starling. 



Caprimulgid/E. — In the article on birds contributed by Robert 

 Gray to the Fauna and Flora of the West of Scotland, published 

 by the Glasgow Society of Field Naturalists, he states that the 

 nightjar (Caprimulgus europtcus) has on various occasions been 

 seen in the evening flying above the grass in the Queen's Park. 

 This was published in 1876. 



Cuculid.e. — In the meteorological notes from the public parks 

 contributed by Mr. M'Lellan, late parks superintendent, to the 

 proceedings of the Natural History Society of Glasgow, he records 

 for a number of seasons what he terms the " rare " and " somewhat 

 rare " occurrence of the cuckoo ( Cuculus canorus) in the Queen's 

 Park especially. One morning, early in the summer of 1890, I 

 saw a cuckoo flying from one of the belts of shrubbery in the Park 

 in the direction of Camphill. 



Alcedinid/E. — When my first series of notes on the present 

 subject was read to the Society, I mentioned having once seen on 

 the Mall's Mire Burn a kingfisher (Alcedo ispida) in hard weather, 



