230 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 



LINOTA LINARIA (Temminck).* 



LESSER EEDPOLE. 



The Lesser Eedpole may be classed as a resident in 

 Norfolk, as well as a regular and, in some seasons, very 

 numerous winter visitant, its nests being found year 

 after year in certain favom^ite localities. I have known 

 as many as four taken in one summer from a garden at 

 Bramerton, which has been a favourite resort of these 

 Httle creatures for a considerable time, and they also 

 breed regularly at Eaton, near Norwich, from whence 

 I have had the young birds in August, as well as their 

 delicate blue and speckled eggs, and the exquisite little 

 structure in which they are laid. In these locahties, 

 the nests have been mostly found in the apple and 

 cherry trees, but Mr. Alfred Newton, in a communica- 

 tion to Mr. Hewitson (Eggs Brit. Birds, 3rd ed.), re- 

 marks that near Thetford, where it also breeds yearly, 

 the nests are placed " close to the trunk of the tree in 

 plantations of young larch firs of no great height," 

 though he once found one at least sixty feet from the 

 ground, and placed near the outer end of a branch. 

 In Suffolk, several nests have been found by Mr, 

 Dashwood in the neighbourhood of Beccles. Like 

 the two preceding species, the lesser redpole often re- 

 tains in confinement, throughout the winter, the rosy 



* As this species is almost entirely replaced in Scandinavia by 

 the preceding one, it is clearly the mealy redpole which Linngeus 

 described under the name of Fringilla linaria; but as I have 

 endeavoured in this work to follow the nomenclature of Yarrell's 

 " British Birds," I retain the specific name " linaria," with that of 

 Temminck as the authority for it — ^he having been the first orni- 

 thologist who mis-applied it in this sense. 



