JUNE 105 



first Lord Baltimore, who received a grant of Maryland 

 in 1632. 



I was puzzled to conceive why our bird should have 

 been induced to show himself by the attraction of a 

 scrap of paper, until I found the following in the late 

 Henry Seebohm's Eggs of British Birds, page 232 : 



'The nest is always suspended from the fork of a hori- 

 zontal branch, sometimes of a pine tree, but generally of an 

 ouk. The outside is composed of broad sedges and strips of 

 inner bark, which are wrapped round the two branches 

 forming the fork from which the nest is pendant. I have 

 generally found intertwined with these long narrow strips a 

 few withered leaves, and almost invariably a scrap or two of 

 newspaper.' 



The occurrence of this beautiful species in Britain 

 is usually announced in the form of an obituary notice, 

 a high price being set on the wanderer's head by col- 

 lectors and taxidermists. More's the shame! for, as 

 the late Lord Lilford remarked, it ' only requires 

 protection and encouragement to become tolerably 

 common,' at least in the eastern and southern counties 

 of England. There are but few notices of its appear- 

 ance in Scotland. Yarrell says that it does not seem 

 to have been identified there; but the Rev. A. Baird, 

 minister of Cockburnspath, Haddingtonshire, in his 

 paper on that parish in the New Statistical ^Account, 

 1834, mentions the golden oriole, the hoopoe, and the 

 Bohemian chatterer 1 as 'occasional visitants.' There 

 are, however, some more recent notices, mostly from 

 the southern Scottish counties, though the golden 



1 The waxwing, Ampelii rjarrulus. 



