GEEAT-SPOTTED WOODPECKER. 291 



becomes as amusing a pet as the nuthatch, and about 

 as active and mischievous. One which was kept alive 

 for some time by a person in this city, in 1857, fed 

 upon barley-meal and insects. The latter were extracted 

 from pieces of old bark supplied fresh every day or 

 two, and fastened to the inside of the cage. 



With an avi-fauna so rich as that of Norfolk, one 

 may well afford to exclude a doubtful species, and 

 for reasons, therefore, which I will briefly explain, 

 I have considered it desirable to omit from the present 

 work the GREAT-BLACK WOODPECKER (Picus martins), 

 believing that it has been too hastily and erroneously 

 classed amongst the accidental visitants to this county. 

 Its introduction at all into our Norfolk "list" rests 

 entirely upon the following passage in Yarrell's " British 

 Birds"* (1st ed., vol. ii., p. 129), where, in enumerating 

 the various instances in which the black woodpecker is 

 said to have appeared in England, he states that " a few 

 years since a communication was made to the Zoological 

 Society of London, that two examples of the great- 

 black woodpecker had been at that time killed in a small 

 wood, near Scole Inn, in Norfolk." This note, on Mr. 

 Yarrell's authority, has been since copied by Mac- 

 gillivray and Morris; and amongst local authors by 

 the Eev. E. Lubbock in his "Fauna," Messrs. Gurney 

 and Fisher in the "Zoologist" (1846, p. 1315), and 

 still more recently by myself, in a paper on "the 

 Ornithology of Norfolk," written in 1863 for the 3rd 

 edition of "White's Gazetteer" of this county.f I had 

 long had the impression that, in this instance, a mistake 

 might have arisen between the great-spotted and the 

 great-black woodpecker, when my idea was accidentally 



* The fourteenth part of this work, in which the statement 

 was published in September, 1839. 



t See also " Zoologist," 1864 (p. 9025). 

 2p2 



