30 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
one being killed, and the other dying the same day. I was told the 
one which was found dead had its crop crammed with wheat. Mr. Mann’s 
two birds were alive and well in November, the male bird in beautiful 
plumage; the female, unfortunately, has lost the use of one eye. They are 
fed on wheat, barley, hemp, millet, buckwheat, and turnip-seed. I have 
frequently heard these birds utter a very low clucking sort of a note. The 
cock bird is much tamer than the hen, which frequently rises and flies 
against the wire of their aviary on the too near approach of people. This 
I have never seen the cock bird do. One which I had recently sent to me 
in the flesh, had in its crop barley, wheat, and some seeds which I am not 
botanist enough to identify. The stomach was crammed with coarse grains 
of saud: this bird was very fat. Harking back to Mr. Travis’s shop, I saw 
there, also, a fine male Golden Oriole, which was obtained in the parish of 
Klndon. I heard that it was captured by some labourers who saw it 
striving to make headway against a strong wind. It was blown under the 
hedge, and they effected its capture. I saw, too, a good specimen of a 
Scops Owl, which was shot at Littlebury, in Essex, of which I read an 
iuteresting account in the ‘ Transactions of the Essex Field Club’ (1888, 
p- 111). While rook-hawking in Cambridgeshire in the spring we came 
ucross a Kestrel’s nest, or rather a Kestrel’s egg, in a wheat-stack. The 
egg was placed in a good-sized hole under the thatching of the stack. (Last 
year we heard that six eggs of a Kestrel were found on a stack in the same 
place, while it was being thrashed). It was disturbed or destroyed soon after 
we saw it, and the old birds (probably the same ones, at any rate) laid in an 
old Rook’s nest in a small clump of tall trees, about half a mile distant from 
the first site. I saw three fledged young ones outside the nest on June 
26th. This part of the country is very bare and devoid of trees, but there 
are trees and woods within a mile of the stacks in every direction; s0 it is 
curious that the hawks should have chosen so unusual a place as a stack 
in which to lay their eggs. Kestrels are not the only hawks which hover ; 
other hawks do so toa certain extent. A wild Peregrine-tiercel which we 
saw on several occasions in Norfolk, appeared one day over our garden, and 
there it hovered for a few seconds, exactly like a Kestrel. It was not more 
than about twenty yards from us, and we could plainly see its head, looking 
down and peering about on the ground underneath. Not many days after 
this I saw a wild Merlin hunting a Lark over the sand-hills. The hawk 
forced the lark to take the air until they were up a good height, the Lark 
ringing and the Merlin mounting much straighter, quickly flapping its 
wings the whole time. The Lark threw itself away very cleverly every 
time the Merlin stooped at it, and the Merlin never had any difficulty in 
gctting above its quarry again after every unsuccessful stoop. At last the 
Lark made great haste down to the saud-hills, aud, evading several more 
stoops of the Merlin, dropped like a stone among the long grass. The 
