4900 THE ZooLtocist—May, 1876. 
April 3rd and 4th. Very large flocks of fieldfares in the meadows 
on each of these days. 
April 4th. Heard the first chiffchaff. This is nearly three weeks 
behind the usual date for this little warbler’s cheerful call to be 
first detected. Noticed in the ‘Times,’ a couple of days since, an 
account of nightingales having been heard singing near Chisle- 
hurst on the 30th of March. Probably the real songster was a 
fall-voiced thrush or blackbird. An average date for the nightin- 
gale to be heard singing for the first time in the spring is the 12th 
of April. In ‘Our Summer Migrants, Mr. Harting gives the end 
of the second week in April as the period of the nightingale’s 
arrival in the South of England. It is well known that the males 
precede the females by a few days, and are generally mute while 
they are taking up their quarters for the summer in some favourite 
hedge or copse. Any one well acquainted with the bird can then 
detect its presence by the harsh call-note it occasionally utters 
while restlessly examining a hedge. ‘The lingering winter has 
delayed the arrival of the earliest and most hardy of our summer 
visitants, so that it is still more unlikely that the nightingale 
should have come a fortnight before its time, and have burst out at 
once into song. I have often wondered at the number of people 
who, ignorant of the true note of the nightingale, confidently raise 
some thrush, blackcap or other warbler to the dignity of the prima 
donna of the copse. Often have I gone out to listen to some 
reputed nightingale, and heard nothing more than the flute-notes 
of a blackbird or the clear melody of a thrush. 
April 5th. In the birdstuffer’s shop in Barnstaple I had to-day 
the pleasure of examining a very fine example of the snowy owl 
which had wandered so far south as Exmoor, and had been trapped 
there on the 22nd of March. A shepherd had observed the bird 
capture and kill two hares in succession, and had hastened to 
inform the keeper that a large bird was making short work with 
the hares on the forest. A trap baited with the remains of one of 
these hares soon proved fatal to the splendid bird, which is a very 
large female, and from its spots 1 should think two or three years 
old. I am told that Mr. Gatcombe reports the occurrence of 
another snowy owl, a male, on Dartmoor—not unlikely the mate 
of the Exmoor bird. My friend the Rev. W. 8S. Hore has in his 
collection a snowy owl—a much older bird than the one so recently 
obtained near Barnstaple—which was picked up dead many years 
