AEN DENS eNOS luc Ve 7 
flocks together, for they are not gregarious, like Finches or Titmice. 
It is quite contrary to the habits of most solitary animals. What is 
the meaning of it then? Can it be to attract or paralyze insects ? 
This seems hardly probable. It may possibly only be uttered when 
the animal is in a satisfactory hunting-ground, and so it may guide 
its fellows to the best elevation for that particular evening. Can 
the echo of this sound enable the Bat to know its distance from » 
the various objects which return the echo? for it is proverbially 
short-sighted: or, after all, may it not be only one of the awful 
noises of the night which, whether they were intended to keep man 
at home, or to enhance the beauties of the day, or for some other 
reasons, seem at all events to have been ordained by the Creator, 
under some general rule, if we may, in all humility, be allowed so 
to speak ? 
Trinity College, Cambridge, 
March 26, 1845. 
Ty 
NOCTULE FLYING IN NovEMBER. 
[‘ Zoologist,’ iv. (1846) p. 1206. } 
I wave this evening seen the Noctule flying round Neville’s Court, 
at a height of thirty or forty feet, and uttering its chirp, but less 
loud than usual. The air is foggy and warm (Zool. 952). 
Trinity College, Cambridge, 
November 21st, 1845. 
Wis 
Tue SpoonBiLu IN ANDALUCIA. 
[‘Zoologist,’ iv. (1846) pp.. 1218 & 1214.) 
One day last August [1845] during a paddle down the Guadalquivir, 
a river of great charms to the Ornithologist, we came upon a Spoon- 
bill, busily engaged in fishing as it waded in the shallow water 
under the bank; its method was to pass its beak sideways through 
the water, keeping it open till something palatable came within its 
grasp; but the action by which it effected this was most singular, for 
instead of turning only its head and neck, it turned its whole body 
from left to right and from right to left, like the balance wheel of a 
watch, its neck stretched out, and its beak immersed perpendicularly 
to about half its depth; this semicircular action was kept up with 
great vigour and at a tolerably quick march. The Spoonbill, it 
appears ‘ snitters with its neb” (I. F. D.) when it is ploughing in 
