3642 The Zoologist — August, 1873. 



and departed, unless we suppose wilful misrepresentation on the part of 

 Mr. Durnford's informant. In Mr. Durnford's note on the herring gull 

 I must also take exception to the following passage, referring to their nesting 

 on the South Stack, Holyhead : — " These birds arrive and depart regularly 

 at the same time in the spring and autumn, and are very jealous of their 

 tenements, not allowing even their own young to nest amongst them." 

 What does this mean? How can any pei^on be sure that adult birds now 

 nesting on the South Stack were not originally reared on the same spot? 

 Mr. Durnford's note in reference to the breeding of Tadorna vulpanser, Flem., 

 received by him at second-hand, is not quite intelligible to me : — " During 

 the time the female is incubating, after feeding, she, in company with the 

 male, flies to the neighbourhood of her nest, and after circling once or twice 

 in the air over the spot, to see whether the coast is clear, flies straight into 

 the hole without alighting on or touching the ground ; and the mallard, after 

 performing one or two more circles, flies off to his breeding-quarters on the 

 extensive sandy flats of Walney." I presume that by " mallard " Mr. Durn- 

 ford means the shieldrake, but this name is usually applied to the male of 

 Anas boschas, Linn. ; " breeding-quarters " is doubtless a misprint for 

 "feeding-quarters"; but I think, without laying myself open to the charge 

 of captiousuess, the readers of such an extensively circulated periodical as 

 tbe ' Zoologist ' are entitled to a little more care in the preparation of the 

 articles tban has been shown in the one I refer to. — H. W. Feilden; 

 Woolwich. 



Birdsncsting and the ^t'ild Birds Protection Act. — It will bo remembered 

 that in the number of the ' Zoologist' for July (S. S. 3015) I had a short 

 note concerning hedgesparrow's eggs laid upon the ground: to this I now 

 have to add one or two additional facts. On May 13th, a relation of my wife's 

 found the egg of a whitcthroat, quite freshly laid, in the middle of a flower- 

 bed at Sittingbourne (this was surely an " early bird," for I have never found 

 the nest of a whitethroat before the last week of May) ; two days later I found 

 the egg of a song thrush in the middle of a strawberry-bed in a clergyman's 

 garden; and as the owners of both gardens jealously protect all the nests 

 built on their premises, it is evident that the eggs in both cases were laid 

 by birds whose nests had been built elsewhere, and which, being disturbed, 

 had been driven to the commission of this unnatural act. The fact of 

 finding eggs thus on three occasions within four days, as also the fact that 

 in one morning subsequently I found seventeen nests, in the whole of 

 which number 1 only found two eggs, caused me to make inquiries amongst 

 my friends in the neighbourhood, and I then learned from several sources 

 that the farmers, being disgusted at the passing of the Wild Birds Protection 

 Act, which deprived them of the satisfaction of destroying the birds (which 

 they firmly believe do more harm than good to their crops), had employed 

 their boys to collect and smash up all the eggs in their grounds ; the small 



