NOTES AND QUERIES. 2638 
150 yards of them, though afterwards many showed their heads above 
water when watching the punt, even approaching within 50 or 60 yards 
before their curiosity was satisfied. The great flock of Godwits let me get 
so close that I knocked over a few with an ordinary shoulder gun, and 
never saw birds in finer condition, one of those killed weighing fourteen 
ounces and measuring seventeen inches in length. On April 10th, resting 
on a sand-bank close to the shore here, I observed twelve Wigeon and a 
large number of Bar-tailed Godwits; and again, a month later, on 
May 10th, I saw fifty or sixty of these birds, with a few Knots and Whim- 
brels, resting on a point of the shore outside one of my fields here.— 
_Roserr Warren (Moyview, Ballina). 
Crossbill Breeding in Immature Plumage. —I read with surprise 
the remarks of your correspondent, Rev. H. A. Macpherson, in the last 
number of ‘ The Zoologist * (p. 229), on the Common Crossbill breeding in 
immature plumage. Surely it ought, now, to be well known to ornitholo- 
gists that the “yellow dress” of the Crossbill is the mature plumage of 
the adult male. In the first, immature, plumage the young Crossbills, 
male and female, are spotted. At the first moult, as is proved by a 
specimen in the Hancock collection in the Newcastle Museum, the young 
male takes the red dress, after which, in all succeeding moults, it acquires 
in the males a greenish yellow or orange-yellow dress. The male bird, 
therefore, observed at the nest by Mr. Ussher was in a very mature 
plumage, and certainly not in immature dress. The large collection of 
stuffed birds and skins of this species in the Newcastle Museum confirm 
the opinion of all those authors—as Temminck, Selby, J. Hancock, and 
others—who contend, and have stated, that the Crossbill acquires and 
wears the red dress at the first moult only, and at all after moults the male 
plumage assimilates to the colour of the female, but is more yellow and 
brilliant. Linnsus. said of his Lowia enucleator, ‘‘ Junior ruber ; senior 
flavus,” and this assumption of the red plumage by the young males 
before acquiring the yellow dress is probably true of all the species allied 
to the Common Crossbill.”—RtcuarpD Howse (Curator of Newcastle-upon- 
Tyne Museum). 
Nesting of the Ringed Plover.—In ‘ The Zoologist ’ for 1886 (p. 418) 
T noticed what I deemed at that time to be an abnormal instance of nesting 
on the part of our common Ringed Plover, Charadrius hiaticula. Having 
passed a portion of this spring at Wells, Norfolk, I have had frequent 
opportunities of following up this subject. The main body of the 
“ Stone-runners,” as they are locally called, settle down to nesting early in 
April, and resort in numbers to the long ridges of shingles and gravels 
near the sea, where, after scratching several holes, they finally select the 
one in which the eggs are deposited. Many of these nesting-sites, being 
