LONDON BIRDS 57 



paratively few exceptions known. The tippet of the 

 Crested Grebe is donned alike by bride and bride- 

 groom, the only difference, if any, being that the lady's 

 tippet is, perhaps, a little smaller. 



The poor bird has never come again. The reason 

 why may not impossibly be read in the following note 

 cut from the Surrey Mirror, a few days after its dis- 

 appearance. 'A rare species of the bird tribe (the 

 Crested Grebe) was shot in the lake, at Gatton Park, on 

 Monday, by the head keeper.' Keepers, as a rule, are 

 excellent fellows. But, with honourable exceptions, 

 they are worse enemies to rare birds than all the bird- 

 nesting boys in the Kingdom put together. 



In 1902 a pair of Great-crested Grebes safely hatched 

 off three young birds on one of the ponds in Richmond 

 Park. They had made an attempt to rear a family in 

 the same place the year before, but had been driven 

 from their sanctuary by an incursion of red deer. 



On the 16th May 1887, a Puffin, taking an un- 

 fortunate short-cut to the breeding-ground, flew into 

 a bedroom window of No. 45 Brook Street, Grosvenor 

 Square, a house which a few months before had been 

 tenanted by the President of the British Ornithologists' 

 Union, the late Lord Lilford. 



Four years earlier, in the spring of 1883, after a spell 

 of windy weather, another of the ' Brevipennes ' was 

 caught alive in Russell Square. Why he came there, 

 unless to prove his title to his name, ' the foolish 

 Guillemot,' it is not easy to say. It is a common thing 

 to pick such birds up by twos and threes dead on the 



