Wade : Status of the Stone Curlew in Yorkshire. i 5 



viz., one by Newton, and one by Stevenson. The favourite 

 breeding-site appears to be a low spur of wold, not too much 

 exposed to the wind, where a good look-out can be kept ; but 

 I have seen the nest on bare chalk pebbles, and on grass, and 

 even on the side of one of those steep valleys so peculiar to the 

 Wolds, where the out-look is very much restricted. 



On the Wolds, the nest is usually lined with chalk pebbles ; 

 on the Suffolk W^arrens, with rabbits' dung. I have even seen 

 grass in it here. No doubt the object of the lining is to isolate 

 the eggs from the damp ground. The eggs are always two, of 

 which one is sometimes addled. The earliest eggs I have seen 

 were on 5th May, very ' hard sat,' and the latest on nth May, 

 fresh, the former in a plantation, the latter on the open wold. 

 The period of incubation, as stated by Mr. E. G. Meade Waldo, 

 in ' British Birds,' August 1907, is twenty-six to twenty-seven 

 days, which I have verified from my own experience, so that 

 we have our wold birds laying at the unusually early date of 

 15th April or thereabouts, and almost a month's interval between 

 the earliest and latest eggs. If the eggs are taken, a second or 

 even a third clutch is laid. I have heard of fresh eggs being 

 taken on Brumby Warren as late as nth July. One &^^ is 

 generally more incubated than the other, shewing that the bird 

 has to guard them against natural enemies. The young, when 

 hatched, are covered with a beautiful light buff down, with two 

 fine black streaks down the back. Their first instinct seems to 

 be to crouch with head along the ground, and closed eyes, and 

 their colouring makes them almost invisible on the flinty soil. 



At the nest the parent bird is incredibly shy, being absolutely 

 invisible. Apparently it runs from the eggs, and does not fly 

 up, for it i? in my experience, impossible to see it at all, and an 

 hour or two's watching is of no use to detect it. Only if the 

 eggs are well incubated, and the intruder remains too long near 

 the nest, the bird's cries of distress maj^ be heard, and it may be 

 seen standing sentinel on the ridge of a distant hillside, with 

 head drawn back into its shoulders. Once I detected it watching 

 me from behind a molehill, its eye just projecting above the soil. 



The natives, as a rule, know the bird only by its habit of 

 flying over the valleys before stormy weather comes. 



How many pairs there may be on the Wolds it is impossible 

 to say. They are so scattered, so shy and invisible, that one 

 might go over the ground where they were a dozen times and 

 never see them. Mr. Hewett, at the meeting of the Yorkshk^ 



1909 January i. 



