472 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



it was busy with the seeds of the willow-herb suggested to me that 

 it is probably a Yellowhammer. It has been haunting willows and 

 sedges by the side of the railway like a Eeed-Bunting, but there were 

 Yellowhammers as well as Eeed-Buntings about the same place. I 

 could not catch any note that might have helped to decide the 

 species. There is not a coloured feather in it, and it is, on a sunny 

 morning, a most beautiful object. An albino Bunting of any species is, 

 I imagine, a rarity. — W. Waede Fowler (Kingham, Chipping Norton). 

 Crossbill nesting in Bedfordshire. — On May 6th a friend and my- 

 self found in one of the pine woods at Sutton what was evidently the 

 nest of the Crossbill ; it had by some means become dislodged, and 

 was lying upon the ground under the trees. Several Crossbills were 

 seen at the time, and two males in full song were heard in this planta- 

 tion previously. On May 8th, in a Scotch fir-plantation known as 

 "Caesar's Camp," at Sandy, we saw a pair with young ; the latter had 

 recently left the nest, and we watched the old birds return to feed 

 them from time to time. My attention was first directed to this 

 family party by the variation in the notes of the birds. — J. Steele 

 Elliott (Dowles Manor, Salop). 



A Variety of the Gannet (Sula bassana). — The variety of the 

 Gannet described by Mr. E. Fortune (ante, p. 340) is, I imagine, the 

 first variety of this species ever recorded ; moreover, it is doubly 

 interesting, because it belongs to a very different class from the 

 albinisms and melanisms which are from time to time reported 

 among all birds. There is also an account of it in ' British Birds ' 

 (iv. p. 153), with a very good photograph by Mr. Jasper Atkinson, 

 done from the bird as it sits on a rock beside two of the normal 

 colour, with one of which it was believed to have paired. This is a 

 lusus natures which is hardly explicable by the ordinary laws of 

 variation in plumage ; to account for it we may perhaps suppose an 

 abnormal intensifying of the buff head and occiput, which is worn 

 by the Gannet in its adult livery. If that be the solution, the buff 

 pigment has not only spread over the entire head and neck and part 

 of the wings, but has turned to a darker colour. There is another 

 and, I think, more probable explanation of this strange freak. It 

 may be a last year's bird still retaining some of its immature 

 plumage, though now faded and altered so much as to be unrecog- 

 nisable. But against this theory it is to be remembered that a 

 young Gannet's plumage is black, not brown, and another point is 

 that the dark plumage is always lost on the head and neck first, the 

 lower back and tail being the last part to change. — J. H. Gueney 

 (Keswick Hall, Norwich). 



