376 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



thither many days in the finer months and, but for the bird- 

 watcher in his hut, in the midst of this waste of mud and waters 

 be alone with the birds. The "close" season, the highly- drained 

 marshes, and the altered flats tempt no new generation of 

 Breydoners ; and but two or three, feeble and aged, now survive 

 the sturdy fellows whom, as a lad, I knew so well.* 



In the autumn of 1913 a well-known Lowestoft ornithologist 

 sent me the carcases of two or three Pallas's Sand-Grouse 

 (Syrrhaptes paradoxus) that had been received, in the skin, from 

 a Far East consignment, in cold storage. I was not particularly 

 smitten with the flavour, which was a bad cross between Pigeon 

 and Partridge. From the gizzards I turned out several seeds, 

 mixed with a quantity of small white stones, which I planted, 

 and with very little trouble raised a number of small plants. 

 Mr. W. A. Nicholson, of Norwich, kindly forwarded them to 

 Kew, and shortly wrote : " I sent them . . . and they named one 

 of them, the others were in much too young a state to admit 

 of certainty even as to the genus . . . one may probably be a 

 Desmodium, and the other a Medicago. The full-grown one 

 with pods is Glycine ussuriensis, Piegel & Maack." 



On October 17th, 1913, I received a small box containing a 

 number of walnuts from Norwich, the sender informing me that 

 they fell from a tree in his garden. " I have had," he wrote, 

 " a great many more like them during the past few days, but 

 never before until this year. The tree is about forty- six or 

 forty-seven years old ; I planted it myself from a nut. It did 

 not bear any fruit until twenty years old, but they are very 

 small, more so than usual this year, for some reason." 



I suggested Nuthatches had been helping themselves, for 

 this species, according to Stevenson ('Birds of Norfolk'), is 

 common in that part of Norwich [Earlham] , but the writer in- 

 sisted they must have been damaged by Starlings, having seen 

 them on the tree — an inconclusive assumption. The nuts were 

 never found in bark-chinks, but invariably on the ground. The 

 depressed end of the shell had been always attacked, and a 

 marble-sized hole had been pecked. Surely a Starling's longer 



* The changes on Breydon during the past fifty years are largely 

 referred to in my ' Nature in Eastern Norfolk ' and ' Wild Life on a Norfolk 

 Estuary.' 



