THE NUTCRACKER. 143 



Black Forest, the Alps, Carpathians, and mountains of Hungary : it probably 

 breeds also in the mountains of Southern Spain and Sardinia. Although apparently 

 a resident bird in the countries of its birth, it occasionally wanders in winter, 

 occurring in various other portions of Europe, as well as in Japan and North 

 China. 



To Great Britain the Nutcracker is an occasional straggler, about a score of 

 tolerably well authenticated instances of its appearance in our islands having 

 occurred, always in autumn or at the commencement of winter ; in Scotland it 

 has occurred, but not in Ireland. 



In colouring the Nutcracker is dull chocolate, freely spotted with white, 

 excepting on the crown, wings, and tail : wings greenish-black, some of the 

 secondaries tipped with white ; the tail feathers black, tipped with white ; bill 

 brownish-black ; feet black ; iris brown. Female similar, but rather smaller and 

 with the wings slightly browner. Young sordid brownish, with the spots greyish, 

 but otherwise like adults. 



Stevenson (Birds of Norfolk, p. 284) commenting upon the difference in the 

 form of the bill in various examples of this bird shot in Great Britain, suggests 

 that it is a sexual character ; the distinctions which he records are exactly such 

 as one would expect to find the male with a stout straight bill, the female with 

 a longer and decidedly narrower one.* I believe that all Passerine birds differ 

 sexually in this respect, and that the male birds recognize the females by their 

 faces alone ; indeed there is little difficulty in detecting the dissimilarity in the 

 features of any of these birds, when the sexes are compared side by side. Using 

 this character alone, which was first pointed out to me by Mr. Joseph Abrahams, 

 I have never yet failed to correctly pair up the sexes of birds for breeding 

 purposes, where no assistance could be gained by a study of the plumage. I am 

 therefore certain that its importance has not been appreciated by Ornithologists. 



In his account of the Nutcracker Seebohm takes the late Rev. F. O. Morris 

 somewhat too seriously: there is no doubt that when the latter gentleman compiled 

 his work on British Birds, he was unable to discover any facts relating to the 

 nidification of our species, and therefore fell back upon the nesting habits of the 

 genus as given in Jerdon's Birds of India, where we read "They breed in holes 

 in trees, which they excavate, or enlarge, with their powerful Woodpecker-like 

 bills," etc., and doubtless when the revised edition was published in 1870, Mr. 

 Morris had not discovered that a genuine description of the nest had been pub- 

 lished in 1862, which differed in all points from that accepted by Dr. Jerdon. 



In June, 1862, Professor Newton exhibited the nest and fully fledged young 



* This difference is, however, frequently reversed. 



