4IO RECREATIONS OF A NATURALIST 



the congelation of the moisture upon the wings, 

 which prevented the expansion of the flight 

 feathers ; and that such an accident does some- 

 times occur has been vouched for in the case of 

 Rooks by Gilbert White in his Natural History of 

 Selborne} and by Daniel in the Supplement to his 

 Rural Sports (p. 636). 



The Kite is said to have been common in the 

 neighbourhood of Dartmoor at the end of the last 

 century (Bray's Tamar and Tavy, vol. i., p. 346), 

 and the late Mr Rodd, of Penzance, thought that 

 no hawk was better known in the large woodland 

 districts of the central part of Devon when he was 

 a schoolboy at Buckfastleigh. He was born in 

 1810, and could depose to its nesting in King's 

 Wood, near Holme Chase, on the eastern borders 

 of Dartmoor. Messrs D'Urban and Mathew, how- 

 ever, in their Birds of Devon (p. 155), express the 

 opinion that the Kite was never so common in 

 Devonshire, or any of the south-western counties, 

 as it was formerly in the home counties and in other 

 parts of England. The Gloucestershire naturalist 

 above referred to has hinted at the cause of this : — 



"Our copses present it with no enticing 

 harbourage, and our culture scares it. In former 

 years I was intimately acquainted with this bird, 

 but its numbers seem greatly on the decline, having 

 been destroyed or driven away to lonely places, or 

 to the most extensive woodlands." 



For " lonely places " we have to cross the Welsh 



1 On November 13, 177 1, Gilbert White saw sixteen Fork- 

 tailed Kites at once on the downs. 



