530 MR. ALFRED NEWTON [DcC. 8, 



' Fauna of Norfolk' (p. 75), can hardly be relied on — not, of course, 

 that there is the slightest reason to doubt the implicit good faith of 

 Sir Thomas Beevor, on whose authority it appears to vest. Next 

 there is the statement contributed to the last edition of Mr. Hewit- 

 son's «Eggs of British Birds' (ed. 3. vol. ii. p. 334*) by Mr. 

 Tristram, to the effect that he found the species breeding near slug- 

 gish streams or mountain tarns between Bodo and Quickjock in 

 Lapland. Now this particular district has since been visited by three 

 other excellent observers, to no one of whom did the Green Sandpiper 

 reveal itself. I therefore hope I may be pardoned for suggesting 

 the possibility of a mistake in my friend's assertion. 



In the ' Naumannia' for 1851 (vol. i. part 2, p. 50), Herr Passler 

 mentions that he had, through his friend the Oberforster Wiese, 

 obtained an egg of Totanus glareola, with the remark that this spe- 

 cies of Sandpiper always " nests upon a tree ;" but in the same 

 periodical for 1852 (vol. ii. part 1, p. 95) he states that Baron von 

 Homeyer had informed him that the egg in question was not that of 

 T. glareola, but of T. ochropus, and adds that during his stay at 

 Haff he had seen many nesting-places of this latter species ; they 

 were on the borders of " Elsenbriiche'" [qucere, swamps of the Ser- 

 vice-tree {Pyrus domesticay.], in the middle of the forest, where the 

 trees stand upon hillocks. In the ' Journal fiir Ornithologie' for 

 1855 (vol. iii. p. 514), the above-mentioned Herr Wiese, writing on 

 the Ornithology of Pomerauia, especially in the district of Coslin, 

 says that he had first heard from an old sportsman, who knew the 

 peculiarities of all the forest-animals, that the Totanus ochropus 

 nested in old Thrushes' nests, which information, he remarks, " I 

 naturally did not believe ;" but he states that some years after, in 

 1845, he obtained from the same man fo\ir fine eggs of a bird of this 

 species, which for many years had been wont to nestle in an old 

 beech tree. Still doubtful on the subject, the following spring he 

 himself found a nest of the bird on a pine which had a fork about 

 five-and-twenty or thirty feet high. " Joyfullj'," he says, " I climbed 

 the tree, and found in that fork four eggs on a simple bed of old 

 moss." He goes on to say that in the spring of 1853 he again ob- 

 tained four eggs of the same species ; and in the spring of 1854 (the 

 year he was writing) he found a nest placed in the old nest of a 

 Song-Thrush, out of which the shed buds of the beech had not so 

 much as been removed. There were four eggs, which were hard sat 

 upon on the 25th of May. 



In the 'Naumannia' for 1856 (vol.vi. p. 34), in an account of 

 an excursion in Western Pomerania ("Vorpommern"), Dr. Altum 

 states that Totanus ochropus returns annually to its old nesting- 

 places, these being Misseltoe-Thrushes' nests, whose remains were 

 still to be seen, often some hundred yards distant from the nearest 

 pool, and their height fifteen feet or more from the ground. The 

 same journal for 1857 contains a valuable series of observations on 

 the birds of the same district by Herr W. Hintz, in which the 

 author says (vol. vii. part 1, p. 14) that on the 6th of May, 1855, 

 he found three eggs of this bird on an "Else" [quaere, Pyrus do- 



