THE BEARDED TITMOUSE. 361 



for long after a favourite locality, and where a marshman named 

 Trent (now dead) used, I am sorry to say, to shoot a great many. 

 Then there is John Hunt, the Norwich birdstuffer, who remarks 

 that in 1819 there were large flocks at Burlingham (? Surlingham), 

 Norf. and Nor. Nat. Tr. (iii. p. 260) ; but ten years later we find 

 the same Hunt speaking of it as not common (Stacy, Hist, of 

 Norf.), which the brothers Paget, writing in 1834, qualify into 

 " common in some seasons." 



Contemporary with Hunt's second statement is a very de- 

 scriptive letter from J. D. Hoy to the well-known naturalist Selby, 

 printed in the Norf. and Nor. Nat. Trans, (ii. p. 402), and which 

 was the basis of a lengthy communication to the Magazine of 

 Nat. Hist. 1830, p. 328. Hoy writes to Selby as follows :— 



"June 23rd, 1828. — Sir, having been highly gratified in 

 looking over your splendid 'Illustrations of British Ornithology,' 

 and thinking that anything you had not perhaps observed in the 

 habits of some of our birds might not be uninteresting to you, I 

 have ventured to forward you a few observations 



" I have had several nests of that most beautiful and elegant 

 of our indigenous birds, the Bearded Titmouse. The margins 

 of the extensive pieces of water, called broads, in the south- 

 eastern part of Norfolk, which are skirted with large tracts of 

 reeds, are the favourite abode of this species : its nest is 

 composed, on the outside, with the decayed leaves of the sedge 

 and reed, intermixed with a few pieces of grass, and invariably 

 lined with the top of the reeds in the same manner as the Reed 

 Wren. It is not so compact a nest as the Reed Wren's ; the 

 eggs vary in number from four to six, pure white sprinkled all 

 over with small purplish spots, rather confluent at the larger 

 end ; full size of the Greater Titmouse. The nest is generally 

 placed in a tuft of grass or rushes near the ground by the side of 

 the water ditches in the fens, sometimes on the broken-down 

 reeds, but never suspended between the reed stems in the 

 manner of the Reed Wren. In the autumn they disperse them- 

 selves in little parties along shore, wherever there is an acre or 

 two of reeds ; during the winter months they feed entirely on the 

 seed of the reed, and so busily employed are they in searching for 

 their food that I have taken them with a fine bird-lime twig 

 attached to the end of a fishing-rod. When alarmed by any 



Zool. 4th ser. vol. IV., August, 1900. 2 c 



