9116 Birds. 
any novel facts this evening, yet it will be, I think, admitted that hitherto we have had 
in England but little positive information on the mode of breeding of the green sand- 
piper; such as it is, however, I will proceed to notice it, First, I must say that I think 
the story of the nest of this bird “by the side of a clay-pit” in Norfolk, as told in 
Mr. Yarrell’s ‘ British Birds’ (vol. ii. p.529) and in Mr. Lubbock’s ‘ Fauna of Norfolk’ 
(p. 75), can hardly be relied on—uot, of course, that there is the slightest reason to 
doubt the implicit good faith of Sir Thomas Beevor, on whose authority it appears to 
rest. Next there is the statement contributed to the last edition of Mr. Hewitson’s 
‘Eggs of British Birds’ (ed. 3. vol. ii. p. 334*) by Mr. Tristram, to the effect that he 
found the species breeding near sluggish streams or mountain tarns between Bodo and 
Quickjock in Lapland. Now this particular district has since been visited by three 
other excellent observers, to no one of whom did the green sandpiper reveal itself. 
I therefore hope-I may be pardoned for suggesting the possibility of a mistake in my 
friend’s assertion. In the ‘Naumannia’ for 1851 (vol. i. part 2, p. 50), Herr Passler 
mentions tbat he had, through his friend the Oberférster Wiese, obtained an egg of 
Totanus glareola, with the remark that this species of sandpiper always “nests upon a 
tree ;” but in the same periodieal for 1852 (vol. ii. part 1, p. 95) he states that Baron 
von Homeyer had informed him that the egg in question was not that of T. glarevla, 
but of T. ochropus, and adds that during his stay at Haff he had seen many nesting- 
places of this latter species; they were on the borders of “ Elsenbriiche,”—quere, 
swamps of the service-tree (Pyrus domestica) ?—in the middle of the forest, where the 
trees stand upon hillocks. In the ‘Journal fiir Ornithologie’ for 1855 (vol. iii. p. 514), 
the above-mentioned Herr Wiese, writing on the Ornithology of Pomerania, especially 
in the district of Céslin, says that he had first heard from an old sportsman, who knew 
the peculiarities of all the forest animals, that the Totanus ochropus nested in old 
thrushes’ nests, which information, he remarks, “J naturally did not believe;” but he 
states that some years after, in 1845, he obtained from the same man four fine eggs of 
a bird of this species, which for many years had been wont to nestle in an old beech 
tree. Still doubtful on the subject, the following spring he himself found a nest of 
the bird on a pine which had a fork about five-and-twenty or thirty feet high. “ Joy- 
fully,” he says, “I climbed the tree, and found in that fork four eggs on a simple bed 
of old moss.” He goes on to say that in the spring of 1853 he again obtained four 
eggs of the same species; and in the spring of 1854 (the year he was writing) he found 
a nest placed in the old nest of a song thrush, out of which the shed buds of the beech 
had not so much as been removed. There were four eggs, which were hard sat upon 
on the 25th of May. In the ‘ Naumannia’ for 1856 (vol. vi. p. 34), in an account of 
an excursion in Western Pomerania (‘‘ Vorpommern”), Dr. Altum states that Totanus 
ochropus returns annually to its old nesting-places, these being misseltoe thrushes’ 
nests, whose remains were still to be seen, often some hundred yards distant from the 
nearest pool, and their height fifteen feet or more from the ground. The same journal 
for 1857 contains a valuable series of observations on the birds of the same district by 
Herr W. Hintz, in which the author says (vol. vii. part 1, p. 14) that on the 6th of 
May, 1855, he found three eggs of this bird on an “ Else” (guere, Pyrus domestica ?) 
in an old dove’s nest, as he thinks, though he states it might have been that of a jay. 
Formerly, he proceeds to remark, he had only observed this sandpiper to use old nests ~ 
of Turdus musicus, excepting once, when he found some young ones, only a few days 
old, hard by a river-bank on a layer of pine-needles on an “ Else”-stub. Soon after 
the publication of this last piece of intelligence, appeared that part of Herr Badeker's 
et 
