OCCASIONAL NOTES. 231 



name to the sound I mean. I certainly should never myself have called it 

 " charring," nor should I, in a manner, have adopted it from Mr. Young, 

 had I not then been convinced that no note I ever heard from the Nuthatch 

 could be so translated, while the jarring note of the Lesser Spotted Wood- 

 pecker — so very familiar to me — might by possibility be so called. The 

 note I have had, and still have, in my mind is that of the latter, and not 

 of the former bird : and, so far as my own experience goes, the two birds 

 have no single note in common ; nor, when heard, liable to be mistaken for 

 each other's by anyone who has had sufficient opportunities of verifying the 

 producer. Although, however, I will not venture to translate the sound 

 I allude to, I may remark that it can be fairly reproduced by drawing a 

 piece of hard stick rather quickly across some wooden palings not set too 

 close together ; in fact, by so imitating it I believe that in several instances 

 the attention of the bird was drawn, and that I was thus enabled to induce 

 it to continue tapping, and so to discover its position. Prof. Newton and 

 Mr. Gurney will, I know, forgive my here alluding to them without their 

 formal consent. The latter, writing to me on the subject, assumes that he 

 is referring to the same sound as myself, and asks if I do not think it is like 

 that of the Wryneck ! stating his belief that " some of the Wrynecks 

 recorded in March were only Nuthatches." This seems to me to prove 

 that the verifying of the notes of birds is a matter at present beset with, 

 at any rate, some little difficulty and confusion, quite apart from the 

 attempt to translate the notes when verified. On this last point it is that 

 Prof. Newton's observations are instructive to me. In part xiv. of his new 

 edition of Yarrell's 'British Birds' (I have not the part by me at this 

 moment) Prof. Newton translates the ordinary cry of the Lesser Spotted 

 Woodpecker by the words, " kink, kink." The cry of this bird, which 

 I should call the ordinary one, is very familiar to me, but those syllables 

 are about the last by which I should ever have thought of describing it. 

 It bears a certain resemblance to that of the Green Woodpecker — very 

 much weaker, of course, and also less clear and resonant. I understood 

 Prof. Newton to agree with me that, besides the jarring spring note, the 

 Lesser Spotted Woodpecker is only known to utter the one in question, 

 and I allude to it here merely to " point the moral," that if " kink, kink" 

 sounds to him like this cry, the attempt to translate obscure notes of birds 

 into ordinarily intelligible language is almost hopeless, and will probably 

 prove misleading. — 0. P. Cambridge (Bloxworth). 



Uncommon Birds in the Isle of Wight. — I am informed by Mr. 

 Dimmick the Ryde naturalist, that a Great Grey Shrike was shot near 

 Brading last October ; a Great Northern Diver, in November, off Ryde ; 

 a Red-breasted Merganser, in December; and a Red-throated Diver, in the 

 same month, which was in a transition state of plumage, that of summer 



