82 BRITISH BIRDS. 



the houses bordering the high road. Having satisfied myself 

 that none were about on the 25th of May, I visited a farm- 

 house about a quarter of a mile down the road, where there 

 are usually twenty nests or more, and to my surprise 

 found a fair number of pairs with nests in all stages of 

 building. Subsequently I kept a sharp look-out round my 

 immediate neighbourhood, but never saw a bird until the 

 14th of June, since when a fair number have appeared, and 

 I have now, 22nd of June, three completed nests on my own 

 house. Several possibilities to account for this occur to me, 

 but none are completely satisfactory, and so they are best 

 left unpublished ; but a difference of at least three weeks in 

 the arrival of a species at two breeding haunts within a quarter 

 of a mile of each other and under precisely similar climatic 

 conditions is, I think, worthy of record. 



J. Lewis Bonhote. 



PAPER USED AS NESTING 'MATERIAL BY 

 LESSER REDPOLL. 



Last year I found in a birch tree at Hampstead a nest of the 

 Lesser Redpoll {Linota rufescens) into the exterior of which 

 a number of strips of white paper, collected from some lying 

 under the tree, had been worked; the nest was thus made 

 very conspicuous, which otherwise would not have been 

 the case, as it was high up in the fork of the tree. 



H. Meyrick. 



CROSSBILLS IN SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND. 



The visits of the Crossbill to Orkney seem to be sufficiently 

 infrequent to be worth recording. On June 29th last I 

 noticed a single bird in a row of stunted sycamores in the 

 garden at Grsemeshall, in the S.E. mainland, and on the 

 following morning there were two others. All three were 

 immature birds with striped breasts, and appeared to be 

 feeding on the seeds of some weed which they procured in the 

 long grass, afterwards flying to the sycamores in order to eat 

 them. I saw them again on July 1st, but after that they 

 appear to have passed on. I may add that the wind was 

 blowing from the N.E. from the 27th to 30th June, and 

 changed to S.E. on July 1st. The trees above mentioned are 

 practically the only ones in the S.E. of the island, and so 

 afforded the only resting place for these birds on their arrival. 

 It will be interesting to see if these individuals were part of 

 an extensive immigration of Crossbills into the British Isles, 



