RARER BIRDS 413 



their nests in the yew-hedge or in the apple-trees. 

 A large holly-bush in the garden, close to the 

 house, which is always thickly covered, by the end 

 of October, with fast-reddening berries, loses them 

 all by the middle of November. They are all 

 knocked down or carried away by hosts of missel- 

 thrushes, song-thrushes, and blackbirds. All other 

 holly-bushes in the neighbourhood they keep in 

 reserve, till they are hard put to it in the sharpest 

 cold of winter. It is useless to try to scare them 

 away from our and their pet bush. Why is this ? 

 Is it that these particular holly-berries are sweeter 

 in themselves than others, or are they sweeter in 

 the eyes of the beautiful marauders because their 

 sweetness is a stolen one ? They knock off and 

 waste many more than they carry off; and, feeding 

 on their remnants, we have, within the week in 

 which I am writing this, seen twice over, for the 

 first time, in this neighbourhood, the shy and 

 solitary hawfinch. Among rarer birds still, I may 

 mention a hoopoe which was seen, and happily not 

 shot, in April last, and was, afterwards, observed 

 unhurt, in a quite different part of Dorset ; the stone 

 curlew or Norfolk plover, one or two pairs of which 

 breed regularly on the flint-bestrewn uplands of 

 Piddletrenthide, a few miles away ; and three 



