iw) 
22 EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY 
Grey Herons and Cormorants, all of which were breeding in 
a large wood. Ray’s delight must have been great, and his 
astonishment also at seeing Cormorants, “a whole-footed 
bird”? as he remarks, building upon trees. Perhaps he did 
not then remember the experience of a certain Englishman, 
to wit Dean Turner, of their nests in Norfolk. ‘‘ When the 
young are ripe,” he says, “ they who farm the grove, with an 
iron hook fastened to the end of a long pole, lay hold on the 
bough on which the nest is built and shake the young ones 
out, and sometimes nest and all down to the ground.” From 
this composite settlement of birds, the young of the Spoonbill 
and Night Heron afforded materials for the descriptions to 
be used afterwards in “The Ornithology.” * Besides the 
four kinds of water-birds in this prolific grove, which was 
rented as high as three thousand guilders—over £200— 
merely for the birds and the grass, there were Ravens, Wood- 
Pigeons and Turtle Doves. From Leyden, Ray and his 
companions moved to Haarlem, and from Haarlem to 
Amsterdam, but as there is little in his book of Travels, 
here or elsewhere about birds, it will be better and simpler 
in following their route to rely on the pages of “‘ The Orni- 
thology.” 
About Collen (Cologne), where the travellers arrived on 
June 30th, 1663, they discovered the Hoopoe to be very 
frequent. “It sits for the most part on the ground, sometimes 
on Willows”; from the stomach of one dissected they took 
beetles. Here, as usual, Ray enumerates the principal plants 
which he found growing by the way, a knowledge of which 
such good use was to be made afterwards. 
At Frankfort, July 14th, they ascertained the Hawfinch 
to be common, and one of the party shot a Golden Oriole, 
many of which they afterwards saw at Naples, and noted that 
it was a bird of passage. Here also they first saw the Black 
Stork.t One of the most important cities which comes 
* See pages 279, 288, 329 of Willughby’s ‘“ Ornithology.” Mr. J. P. 
Thysse states that the last eggs of the Night Heron, which has now vanished 
as a breeder from Holland, were taken at Lekkerbeck in 1876. Dutch 
breeding settlements of the Spoonbill are also reduced to two; the wood in 
which they nested at Sevenhuys, according to Pennant (‘‘ Brit. Zool.,” app.) 
was destroyed some time prior to 1768. 
j ‘The Ormithology,” pp. 199, 245, 286, 
