9842 Birds. 



White Wagtail. — Though I might have shot the adult light- 

 coloured birds when nesting, there is now a difficulty in procuring 

 specimens, there being so many young gray-backed wagtails ; but one 

 shot on the 3rd of August differs from the rest, and the bill is shorter, 

 proportionally, slighter and straighter, though the first distinction is 

 not always to be relied on, " birds bills, like men's noses, varying in 

 length," as I once was facetiously told by a northerner. The tail- 

 feathers are remarkably narrow, and the third has no white margin, as 

 in the pied species. Both primary and secondary quills are externally 

 margined with white, the inner ones broadly. The measurements are 

 not given, the bird not being full grown. This may or may not be the 

 young of the white wagtail, but I feel confident that the adults ob- 

 served in June were not of the pied species, unless they breed in the 

 immature gray plumage. We are not always happy in our nomen- 

 clature, and the wagtails are perhaps the most absurdly named of all ; 

 for instance, "dish-washer," " oat-seed bird," &c.; and then the gray- 

 backed bird is called the white wagtail, and a yellow wagtail the grat/, 

 but why I never knew, till seeing it explained by Buffon as a " deno- 

 mination pen cxacte, et qui vient originairement de Willughby, qui 

 reconnoit lui-uieme n'avoir dccrit que la femelle." 



Willow Wren. — August 22. The yellow wren, though but lately 

 returned, is to-day swarming in our gardens, so that the trees seem 

 alive with them : they are, I believe, mostly birds of the season, being 

 duller in plumage and shorter in the tail than the adult. This species 

 usually congregates here before the autumnal migration, but its stay in 

 the under-clifT, on its arrival in the spring, is of short duration. 



Robiti. — August 25. Robins are beginning to return to the gardens 

 in and around the town. 



Brown Buzzard. — August 30. When strolling in my garden this 

 morning 1 was astonished at seeing two large rapacious birds, at a great 

 height, in the distance, and whose soaring and wheeling flight re- 

 minded me of the kite and the roughlegged buzzard, both species well 

 known to me, but on their nearer approach, though still at a consider- 

 able altitude, I found, on examining them through a glass, that they 

 were neither kites nor roughlegged buzzards, but brown buzzards. 

 The larger bird (or female) was of a dark brown, both above and 

 beneath ; the smaller one of a light brown on the back, whitish beneath 

 the body and wings, the latter appearing barred and mottled, but the 

 central part white. So much do they differ, both in colour and size, 

 that they might readily be taken, in the distance, for birds of different 

 species. 



