346 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



NOTES AND QUEEIES. 



MAMMALIA. 



Decrease of the Squirrel. — So far as my personal observations go, 

 the decrease of the Squirrel (ante, p. 274) — at least, in the Midland 

 Counties — is very general, and for what reason it is very difficult to 

 conjecture. Their numbers used to be kept down on some estates, 

 but this has ceased to be necessary nowadays, and with all the 

 encouragement and preservation they receive at the hands of others 

 their numbers have rapidly decreased. As a schoolboy in Bedford- 

 shire (the county I know most intimately), some thirty years ago, 

 Squirrel hunts were very much in vogue, and there was no difficulty 

 in finding our quarry commonly in any of the larger spinneys and 

 plantations and well-timbered parts of that county. From many of 

 such localities it is now entirely absent, and comparatively rare in 

 even the larger firwoods ; so much so, it is often quite overlooked by 

 the ordinary observer. — J. Steele Elliott (Dowles Manor, Salop). 



A VE S. 



Grey Lag Geese in Cumberland. — The occurrence of Anser cinereus 

 in any of the northern counties of England is always sufficiently rare 

 at any season to make it worth putting on record, while it is quite 

 unusual to find any kind of Wild Goose in the country during August. 

 It was with no common interest, therefore, that on Sunday evening 

 last (August 10th) I listened to the familiar gaggling of a party of 

 Grey Lags passing overhead, about 11 p.m., two or three miles west 

 of Alston, in North-west Cumberland. It was, of course, too dark to 

 see anything of them at that hour, but the calling seemed to indicate 

 that there might be at least half a dozen birds in the gaggle. The 

 evening was absolutely calm, and their cries demonstrated that the 

 birds were flying very high, travelling in a south-westerly direction, 

 which would very shortly bring them over the Eden and Ulleswater 

 valleys, where, according to the late Eev. H. A. Macpherson, the 

 species once maintained a precarious footing. In ' The Birds of 

 Northumberland and the Eastern Borders,' published just a year ago, 



