174 OUR SUMMER MIGRANTS. 



October, 1871, wrote me as follows: "The 

 perusal of your interesting remarks relative to 

 the food of the Chimney Swallow, and especially 

 with reference to its bee-eating propensities, 

 induces me to send you a note of an analogous 

 habit of which I have heard, in one instance, in 

 the Common Swift. An intelligent shepherd in 

 Norfolk, with whom I am acquainted, and who 

 keeps bees, states that a pair of Swifts which 

 nested in the roof of his cottage were so de- 

 structive to his bees, by catching them on the 

 wing when they happened to fly rather higher 

 than usual, that he at length destroyed the 

 Swifts in order to free his bees from their 

 attacks. With reference to the food of the 

 House Martin, I may mention that some years 

 since, as I was watching some of these birds 

 skimming over a roadside pond early in the 

 month of May, one of them, as it flew past me, 

 dropped at my feet a water beetle of the genus 

 Dytiscus, nearly, if not quite, half an inch in 

 length. Possibly it had captured a prey too 

 large to be conveniently swallowed." All the 



