Short Notes. 197 
lighting fires at it, and amusing themselves for hours together. The young 
birds were duly hatched and reared, and I believe that there is going to be 
another nest in the same hole this spring, as a pair of old birds have been 
seen more than once lately near the place. 
I saw a Greater Spotted Woodpecker on the 1st of February, but have 
not been able to find him again; and in the course of the winter I have 
seen a pair of Peregrines on two occasions, a single bird repeatedly ; a 
Sheldrake (a very fine male); and a Coot, a bird which I have never seen 
in the brooks near here before. 
There was what I may call a complete absence of Fieldfares and Redwings 
from the fields in this immediate neighbourhood after November. The 
Redwings arrived in the third week of October, but in small numbers, the 
Fieldfares later, and they were more numerous—good flocks of them were 
with us for about a fortnight, then they disappeared, but in the first week 
of February came back, and are still (April 8th) about. A very few 
Redwings also came back. 
A. B. FisHeEr. 
Omosaurus or Stegosaurus, from the Kimmeridge Clay of Swindon. 
Some years ago a number of Saurian bones (now to be seen in the Natural 
History Museum at South Kensington) were found at the Swindon Brick 
and Tile Works. They were regarded at the time as belonging to a new 
genus of Saurians, to which the name “ Omosaurus” was assigned. It 
appears, however, that amongst the astounding series of monsters whose 
bones have been found and described by Professor Marsh in the Western 
States of America (see “‘ Hatinct Monsters,” by the Rev. H. N. Hutchinson) 
one of the most astonishing, the “ Stegosaurus,’ is really identical with 
the creature to which the Swindon bones belonged. This monster, whose 
length was about 30ft., either walked on all fours or sat up on end on his 
hind legs and tail—the latter member being of enormous dimensions and 
armed with four pairs of great spines. All down his back he had a cresting 
of great erect bony plates, and, whilst he had but a small set of brains in 
his head, he seems to have had a second set of larger dimensions in his 
haunches, to control the movements of his gigantic hind quarters. 
Swallows roosting in osier beds. A letter appeared in The Times of Sept. 
18th, 1896, describing a remarkable flight of swallows observed on the 
evening of Sept. 15th at Chiswick, in the following words :—“ It was a dark, 
dripping evening, and the thick osier bed on Chiswick Eyot was covered 
with wet leaf. Between 5 and 6 o'clock immense flights of swallows and 
martins suddenly appeared above the eyot, arriving, not in hundreds, but 
in thousands and tens of thousands. The air was thick with them, and 
their numbers increased from minute to minute. Part drifted above, in 
clouds, twisting round like soot in a smoke-wreath. Thousands kept 
sweeping just over the tops of the willows, skimming so thickly that the 
sky-line was almost blotted out for the height of from 3ft to 4ft. In 
time I discovered whence they came. They were literally ‘ dropping from 
