5122 THE 7,00LoGIst—OcToBER, 1876. 
a battle royal ensued, and, after the manner of stage-plays, always ended in 
the discomfiture of the villain of the piece. On cold days—and there was 
an unpleasant prevalence of N.E. winds at the time—it was funny to see 
how these birds would seek out the most sunny parts of the roof for their 
afternoon siesta, carefully placing themselves under the lee of the chimney- 
pots and nestling close to each other for increased warmth. The sticks for 
their nests were chiefly broken off the branches of trees and shrubs in the 
gardens below, though occasionally good-sized ones were brought from a 
distance, as also were masses of grass or fibrous stuff of some kind, as it 
appeared through my telescope, and a considerable amount of deal-shavings, 
gathered close by where carpentering work was going on. ‘The chief 
novelty, however, was to watch them, even at midday, alight in the roadway 
before the houses, a busy thoroughfare, and carry off the freshly-dropped 
horse-dung in large masses to their nests; but whether used partly by way 
of lining, or, with a strange instinct, to plaster up some draughty crevices 
in their lofty nurseries, I am quite unable to say.—H. Stevenson; Norwich, 
September 12, 1876. 
Wood Wren and Greenshank in Sutherland.—While staying at Helms- 
dale, last May, [ found the wood wren singing at Kildonan, which is about 
ten miles up the Helmsdale River. I am well acquainted with its peculiar 
tremulous note, the bird being very abundant here (at Cobham). This is 
the furthest northern locality in our islands that the wood wren has yet 
been recorded from. I heard one this summer close to the high road at 
Chislehurst, where I should hardly have expected to find one. I saw 
nothing else very rare at Helmsdale, beyond a pair of greenshanks, which 
were evidently nesting at Kildonan, and were very fierce in their attacks 
upon me.—Clifton ; Cobham Hall, September 4, 1876. 
[Hitherto the range of the wood wren northward in the British Islands 
has not been known with certainty to extend beyond Loch na Nuagh, in 
Inverness-shire, on the west coast, and the neighbourhood of Banff on the 
east.— Ep. | 
Habits of the American Cowbird.—Though much interested in the 
extracts from Dr. Coues’s ‘ Birds of the North West,’ I doubt the cowbird’s 
ability to “slip by stealth” into the nests of such numerous species as it is 
known to deposit an egg in. Nor do I see in the building by the summer 
yellowbird of a two- and three-storied nest a ‘proof of its possessing a 
faculty indistinguishable, so far as it goes, from human reason.” It gives 
up a nest the cowbird’s egg has been laid in, and builds another on the top 
of it, leaving the “obnoxious egg in the basement.” Would it not have 
been better and more akin to reason had the summer yellowbird sought out 
a more secluded spot, unknown to cowbird, and there made a new nest, 
instead of adding a second story to the first, making it more conspicuous 
than before—to say nothing of the third story referred to? Again, how 
