HOOPOE. 181 



to be forgotten. It can scarcely be considered a very rare 

 bird, since hardly a season passes but one or more examples 

 are obtained, and there is not a county on our southern or 

 eastern coasts in which this species has not been killed 

 several times. Though a summer visitor from North Africa, 

 and going even to the north of Europe, it mostly makes 

 its appearance in this country after the breeding season is 

 over ; and the period of the year in which this bird com- 

 monly occurs is in autumn. To this, however, a few ex- 

 ceptions are recorded. Dr. Latham had a young bird sent 

 him on the 10th of May, 1786. A Hoopoe was shot at Bon- 

 church, Isle of Wight, in April, 1852. Montagu mentions 

 that a pair in Hampshire left a nest they had begun ; and 

 Mr. Jesse, in the third volume of his Gleanings in Natural 

 History, says, that " some years ago a pair of Hoopoes 

 built their nest, and hatched their young, in a tree close to 

 a house at Park-end, near Chichester." They build con- 

 stantly in hollow trees, collecting a few grass bents and 

 feathers, upon which from four to six or seven eggs are 

 deposited : these are of a uniform pale lavender grey, one 

 inch and half a line long, by eight lines in breadth. These 

 birds pass much of their time in the day upon the ground, 

 appearing to prefer low and moist situations near woods, 

 where they search for insects, upon which they principally 

 subsist. I have had two opportunities of examining the 

 stomach of the Hoopoe, when killed in this country, one of 

 which contained the remains of small coleopterous insects, 

 the other was partly filled with the skins of caterpillars of 

 two different species. Bechstein, in his Cage Birds, has 

 given an interesting account of the habits of these birds in 

 confinement, and Mr. Blyth has described, in the second 

 volume of the New Series of the Magazine of Natural 

 History, the actions of five or six of these birds, which 

 were alive in London in the year 1838. I am indebted to 



