LONDON BIRDS 55 



there were at times as many as one hundred of them 

 at once on the Round Pond. They came and went 

 unaccountably, rnd within a few days the place was 

 alive with them and deserted again. As a rule, though, 

 there were ten or a dozen at least to be seen feeding 

 tolerably near the edge. They were then common, too, 

 on the other waters in the parks. For the last few 

 years six or seven pairs have bred regularly in St. 

 James's Park. They commonly arrive late in March 

 or early in April, and disappear with their families 

 before the end of October. A nest built in 1887, in an 

 exposed place, was, after it was finished, cut from its 

 original moorings by the builders and towed a yard or 

 two to a more secluded corner under an overhanging 

 bush. Unluckily the second lashings were not so 

 strong as they should have been, and a fresh breeze 

 springing up, the raft was wrecked, and the four eggs 

 it carried went to the bottom. In a gale which 

 occurred on the 8th of March 1893, a Dabchick's nest, 

 which had been made fast to the dipping boughs of a 

 black poplar facing the India Office, broke from its 

 moorings and drifted into the open. The hen bird, 

 who was sitting at the time of the accident, stuck 

 bravely to her eggs, and in a twelve days' voyage, 

 during which her mate had been seldom out of her 

 sight, crossed and recrossed from the peninsula to the 

 mainland, and sailed in and out among the flag clumps 

 for nearly a hundred yards in a southerly direction 

 along the east shore of the lake. Her constancy was 

 rewarded, and on the 20th of the month, she floated 



