3314 THE ZooLocist—NovemBER, 1872. 
Cuckoo’s Stomach.—TI send you the stomach and its contents of a young 
cuckoo found dead on the 23rd of August. I had seen the bird a day or 
two before ; it was sitting on the battlement of a bridge, and allowed me to 
approach within a few yards of it. I thought it looked very sickly. On 
examining it I could find no trace of any injury it had received; and it 
seems to have died through not being able to digest the enclosed stringy 
mass: I took it out of the stomach and partly loosened it; it was a 
tightly laced ball, covered with fine sand, which fell off when it dried.— 
J. Sclater ; Castle Eden Castle, September, 1872. 
[This curious mass appeared to consist of grass dried into a state of hay, 
and then tightly rolled into a ball: I am unable to give any explanation 
of this occurrence, having never seen or heard of anything of the kind 
before.—H. Newman.] 
Swallows roosting on Rushes.— This evening, while walking round the 
lake, on the side of which there are several patches of bulrushes, I heard a 
rustling noise; and on going to see what caused it I found that the 
bed was full of birds just going to roost, and making themselves 
comfortable for the night. There must have been hundreds of them, the 
greater part being the common swallow, though there were a great many 
house martins and wagtails. Great numbers of the reeds in which they 
were roosting were broken and cracked, showing that it must have been a 
favourite place. When disturbed the birds flew up in a cloud, but soon 
returned again.—J. Whitaker, jun. ; September 28. 1872. 
White Swallow. — On the 11th of September I saw, at the birdstuffer’s 
in Nottingham, a white swallow; the whole of the plumage was white, 
except the breast, which was tinged with pink.—Jd. 
Diseased Partridges.— Nearly all the partridges in this district are 
diseased. I have heard of numbers of hares found dead this year in 
districts where the foot and mouth disease is prevalent. The theory is that 
they are poisoned by the grass infected by the saliva of the cattle. Can 
this be true ?—Arthur G. Latham. 
Quails in Nottinghamshire—Whilst mowing a piece of wheat on the 
5th of September, about the last in the neighbourhood, the men flushed 
from fifteen to twenty quails ; the farmer, who was by with his gun, killed 
a brace. On the 9th I flushed ten, four of which I killed, three of them 
being birds of the year.—J. Whitaker, jun. 
Sanderling and Cockle.— On the 2ud of September my brother shot a 
sanderling having a cockle-shell attached to the middle toe; the fish in the 
shell was alive, so I suppose the bird had been caught by accidentally 
treading on it.—H. R. Leach. 
Notes on the Heronries of Norfolk and Suffolk.k—I have read with 
much interest Mr. Harting’s valuable paper on British heronries (Zool. 
S. 8. $261); and I desire to offer a few additional remarks on those of the 
