THE BLUE-HEADED WAGTAIL 179 



Wagtail with its lovely tints. It would come tripping 

 blithely along a certain road on its way from one rough 

 fallow field to another, a most dainty, and I fancied then, 

 even foreign-looking little creature. It has a prettier 

 song than its relatives, the Grey and the Pied Wagtails, 

 and is altogether a daintier looking bird. Nor is it so 

 common, being very local in its distribution. Leaving 

 us in September, little parties of the Yellow Wagtails 

 are formed then, and some districts only make their 

 acquaintance with these birds when on their migratory 

 flight. Lately I heard of a company of about seventy 

 Wagtails resting for the night in Kew Gardens grounds, 

 where they had not been noted before. They frequent 

 the meadows beside the Brent by Perivale, Baling, 

 where small, thin-shelled molluscs by the stream, and 

 insects stirred into activity by the heavy feet of the 

 grazing cattle, furnish them with food. I watched one 

 day a pretty sight, i nir Lie Wagtail in close attend- 

 ance on an old sheep. The way it darted nimbly about 

 this animal's face, picking off the tiny flies as the creature 

 fed was wonderful. Sometimes you may chance to see 

 one picking the torturing little insects out of an old 

 horse's ears as it lies resting on the sward. 



The yellow species is called Motacilla raii, but the 

 Abbe Vincelot, who wrote half a century ago, on the 

 birds of Maine-et-Loire, treating special!^ of their names 

 as descriptive of their manners, call it Motacilla boarula, 

 and he said he thought the latter designation came from 

 Boaria, an old name for Bavaria, used after the Boi'ens, 

 driven by the Marcomans from Bohemia, settled there. 

 This name Boi'ens seems to have been given to the tribes 

 who reared and tended cattle. There were Boi'ens of Gaul, 

 of Italy, and of Germany. In Poitou an ox is still called 



