28 



THE ZOOLOGIST. 



were quite different, being made in the reeds, and were constructed by 

 twining them in and out until a small platform was made about eight 

 or ten inches in width, and about five or six inches high. These nests 

 were never lined, and must have been, as Mr. Pike says, used as a 

 roosting-place for the young birds. I think the strangest circumstance 

 is that they were built so differently from the real nest, and Mr. Pike 

 does not say whether he noticed this point or not. It is a well-known 

 fact that Wrens build a number of false nests, very much after the 

 fashion of the Moor-hen ; but I have never heard of these being used 

 for any purpose. The Rev. J. C. Atkinson, writing in ' The Zoologist ' 

 (1844), p. 767, on the second nests of these birds, says, occasionally 

 constructed " to accommodate a moiety of its young when they have 

 attained a size too large to permit the original one to contain them all. 

 And when the colony is sent to the second nest, one of the old birds 

 accompanies it. An instance of this habit occurred in the vicinity of 

 my father's residence when I was last at home. The female Moorhen 

 was the architect, and the subsidiary nest she busied herself in con- 

 structing was built on a bough overhanging the water." Mr. Atkin- 

 son, in his little book on Birds, Nests, and Eggs, also records this fact. 

 W. H. Woekman (Lismore, Windsor, Belfast). 



Unusual Nest of the Ringed Plover (.Egialitis hiaticula). — Scores 





*M 



r.v 





Mmmmmmmmms 



P 



of Ringed Plovers nest on the gravel sea-banks which nearly surround 

 a four hundred-acre farm in the neighbourhood of Portsmouth, some- 



