302 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



noisily welcome (?) by a brace of chained dogs belonging to a 

 well-known circus proprietor. It was but a short ramble from 

 here to the heronry ; the harsh cries of 3ome of the birds betoken- 

 ing that several of them were as yet at home. Pearson, a most 

 intelligent and interesting man, and who seems justly proud of 

 the birds, pointed out, as we strolled along, a turnip-field most 

 woefully suffering from the "canker"; on every leaf, or rem- 

 nant of it, were numbers of small green larvae,* with curiously 

 pointed posterior, and which skipped about in a most excited 

 manner on a sheet of paper when touched, in that lateral 

 wriggling fashion assumed by a chopped worm, but infinitely 

 more quickly. At the time of writing I am informed that my 

 old friends the Starlings are now after them by thousands, but 

 the pests are so widely distributed in Norfolk this year that 

 irreparable damage will be done the farmers. On the field men- 

 tioned a hundred and forty Herons have at times assembled. 



As one enters the closely packed clump of tall Scotch firs and 

 somewhat attenuated ashes, he is greatly impressed by the 

 luxuriant growth of the reeds and bracken that, often together, 

 crowd beneath them, the fronds of the latter shoulder-high in 

 places ; whilst beautiful ferns, tall vicious nettles, and sprays of 

 red campion abound, and hundreds of red-ripe wild raspberries 

 invite him to pluck and taste them. The height of the trees 

 and their thickly bushed tops attract attention, as also does one 

 ancient fir, standing in their midst dead and decaying — a barked, 

 scarred, and punctured skeleton ; you feel something akin to 

 pity as well as interest in the old thing, which seems ready to 

 totter and fall, but the sturdy survivors, clustering around it, 

 ward off the evil day, and screen it from every wind. In that 

 dead tree more interest seemed centred than in all those living ; 

 it had died of sheer old age, and was now a happy hunting- 

 ground of the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker. The droppings of 

 the Herons had not killed it, or why had it suffered alone ? The 

 thickly growing undergrowth had caught much of the Herons' 

 excreta before any of it had touched the earth beneath it, and, 

 far from suffering, grew the more rankly for it. There was " an 



* I forwarded several of thein to Mr. H. J. Thouless, of Norwich, with 

 whom they pupated ; he has since informed me they were the larvae of a 

 small moth (Pltitella cruciferarum). It is a very distinctive species. 



