MISTLETOE 307 



there no other enemies. We saw a very great number, 

 and they are very wide awake in the day time but 

 though no amount of driving and fair shooting will 

 materially affect the species, the demand aforesaid in 

 Seville has evoked a murderous practice of shooting them 

 with lantern and bell at nights, which is most destructive 

 to the male birds, but they are if not polygamous " muy 

 putaneros," as a young Spaniard said to me, and every 

 healthy old male treads every female that he can get at. 



If you could spare the necessary time, there would 

 be little difficulty in seeing Pkcenicopterus at his home 

 either in Spain or in Sardinia. 



You are right in supposing that I blundered about 

 Cyanecula ; those we found at Neuevahn were the 

 white-spotted race, which is apparently entirely un- 

 known to the natives of those parts. 



We go to Lilford this week, when you shall promptly 

 have some venison. I do not know exactly whereabouts 

 Irby's shoot is, but I believe that Wimborne is his post 

 town. I have just heard of a nest of Hobby near Lilford, 

 but not on my own territory. 



Yours very truly, 



LILFORD. 



December 20, 1890. 



MY DEAR LILFORD, 



It is the very Viscus berry itself that 

 T. viscivorus visits the tree opposite my window to 

 devour, the tree being an old apple with a fine growth 

 of Mistletoe upon it. In all the more than 26 years 

 that I have been here I have never seen any other bird 

 touch a Mistletoe berry save a Robin on one single 

 occasion ; but T. viscivorus clears them all off when 

 they are really ripe. This very morning there sat a 

 wretched Song-Thrush, with plenty of Mistletoe berries 

 over his head and around him, but he did not even look 

 at them, and so it always is. Yet the taste of this very 

 bird is adaptive enough to let him be greedy over pie- 

 crust. 



