NOTES AND QUERIES. HI 



side, croaking to each other. The Heron seemed much annoyed by their 

 pertinacious attentions, and stalked, stumbled, and fluttered to the far end 

 of the meadow, where he disappeared into another dyke, closely attended by 

 the officious Hooded Crows. The next day, at the same hour, the bird 

 returned to the dyke, but a stupid neighbour must needs come out and 

 discharge his gun at the Heron, and naturally it has not again visited us 

 in the daytime.— H. W. Feilden (West House, Wells, Norfolk). 



[An amusing observation, by the late Frederick Bond, of a Heron 

 killing and swallowing a House Rat, may be found in Harting's ' Sketches 

 of Bird Life '(Allen and Co., 1883, pp. 368,269). Dr. Patrick Neill, of 

 Canonmills, near Edinburgh, had a pair of tame Herons in his garden, 

 and told Selby that he had seen the cock bird " fell a Rat by one blow on 

 the back of the head, when the Rat was munching at his dish of fish." 

 111. Brit. Orn., vol. ii., p. 13, note.— Ed.] 



Chiffchaflf wintering in Somerset. — On Dec. 27th, 1891, a warm 

 sunny day, at South Cadbury, in Somersetshire, I observed a little bird 

 flitting rapidly among the boughs, and picking off the small flies which 

 swarmed about the twigs of a hazel bush. I took it to be a Willow Warbler, 

 but thinking it might turn out to be something even more unusual than 

 that, with a snap shot I managed to secure it. On examination, its dark 

 legs showed it to be a Chiffchaff. Montagu saw this species several times 

 in winter in Devonshire; and Mr. Howard Saunders states, in his 'Manual 

 of British Birds,' that " a comparatively small number occasionally pass the 

 winter in various sheltered portions of our islands, especially in Cornwall." 

 This example from Somerset may perhaps be worth recording among your 

 notes. On my return to town I took the specimen to the Natural History 

 Museum, and it is now being preserved for the national collection.— Robert 

 H. Read (2, Queen Square Place, Westminster). 



Unusual Nesting of the Chiffchaff.— Under this heading Mr. Allan 

 Ellison writes, in ' The Zoologist ' for December, 1891, that he found a 

 nest of the Chiffchaff fully three feet from the ground. Although I have 

 never found one so high up as this, I may state that in the locality where I 

 obtained the bird referred to in the foregoing note I found the Chiffchaff 

 very plentiful during the previous breeding season. On the morning of 

 Whit-Monday, May 18th, 1891, I found no less than six nests of this bird, 

 and one the previous evening, all containing eggs except one. In one of 

 these nests the eggs were spotted with pale rusty red, resembling a common 

 type of Willow Warbler's egg. Four of the nests were placed in the banks 

 of hedgerows, generally on a tussock of coarse grass ; two were in low 

 brambles, about eight inches from the ground ; and one was in a bunch of 

 brambles overhaugiug a ditch, about two feet six inches from the bottom of 



