5108 THE ZooLocist—OcTOBER, 1876. 
Sand Martins nesting in Sawdust-heaps.—Travellers by the 
Cambridge line of the Great Eastern Railway will have observed 
for many years past large quantities of sawn fir timber closely 
adjoining the Brandon station, and which, with the addition of 
huge stacks of sawdust piled up on the spot, give evidence of a 
busy trade. In these stacks of wood-fibre, firmly compressed and 
consolidated by the action of the weather, sand martins have of 
late discovered a novel, and I believe hitherto unrecorded, nesting- 
place. I was first informed of this curious fact by Mr. E. Bidwell 
in the summer of last year, and an ornithological friend residing in 
the neighbourhood confirms the same from his own observations 
this season, having found the sand martins, in considerable num- 
bers, boring into the firm but easily-worked strata of these 
wooden cliffs. 
The Polish Swans (?) at Northrepps.— Like Mr. Southwell 
(Zool. 8.8. 5084) I must own that my previous impression that 
Yarrell’s so-called Polish swan is a good species has been greatly 
strengthened by an examination of a white cygnet, one of a brood 
hatched this summer at Northrepps by the pair of birds formerly in 
the Zoological Gardens. This cygnet differs essentially in colour 
from any mute swan cygnet I ever saw, for an albino cygnet of the 
mute swan is utterly unknown on the Yare, where such large 
numbers of the common swan are reared yearly for edible purposes. 
I cannot agree with Mr. J. H. Gumey, jun. (S. 8. 5047) that the 
occurrence, as asserted, of mixed broods of white and gray cygnets 
militates against the specific difference of Cygnus immutabilis, as 
it is quite possible that in the case he cites from the ‘ Field’ of 
July 8th, 1871 (which had escaped my notice previously), in which 
two of a brood of cygnets, bred on a lake in South Wales in 1870, 
were white, and also one out of six, in the season of 187], were the 
offspring of mixed parentage, one of the old birds being—probably 
unknown to the owner—a Polish swan, or descended from a true- 
bred bird of that race or species. The same was no doubt the 
case with Dr. Westerman’s cyguets. 
HENRY STEVENSON. 
Norwich, September 12, 1876. 
