Notes



141



In the nestling, the beak, legs, and feet were pale horn, the head

brown with three light yellowish white stripes, the throat yellowish -

white, the wings brown with two black bars, and the body dark brown,

like the wings, with darker and lighter bars and mottling, the under

parts paler. In colour they look very much like the young of the

Chinese Painted Quail, not at all like the Rain Quail, their nearer

relative. These are the only species with which I can compare them.


H. L. Sich.



BIRDS IN A GARDEN NEAR LONDON


I am glad to have three more birds to add to the number in our

garden, mentioned in the April number of the Avicultural Magazine,

to wit, the Great Spotted Woodpecker, the Willow-warbler, and a noisy

Jay, who haunts the place and seems inclined to stay. The Wood¬

pecker was tapping so busily on an apple-tree close to the gardener’s

cottage, that it took no notice of a child patting on the window opposite,

but continued its tapping, then flew off quietly into a hedge of old

hawthorns and elder. The Willow-wren, singing charmingly among

some nut-trees, was detected by an ornithologist friend, who was

searching for nests in the orchard. The Spotted Flycatcher, mentioned

in my April number account of our birds as having for years nested on

the bough of an old cedar, has now built in an old nest in the rustic

oak porch of the said gardener’s cottage, and has hatched its young.

It was so fearless that a little child lifted up to the nest could touch

the sitting hen bird. Two young were hatched, one now flown, but

the other died in the nest, the mother-bird having been frightened awav

by a stranger entering the porch and remaining there for some time.


A wild Turtle Dove has come to stay it seems, and actually enters the

verandah, where it fights in the air almost every evening with a Barbary

Dove over the acquisition of the food put out for the latter. There

is now a nest of Barbary Doves in the verandah, and two young

were hatched in July. It was absurd to see the parents guarding the

verandah as if it were their own, and the cock attacking the wild Turtles

which come to feed without any aggressive designs, I feel sure, on the

precious nest.



