260 



BIRDS. 



records within the bounds of any of our sections ; and Don makes no 

 mention of it. 



It is of course extremely probable that in some places the species 

 may have been overlooked for a few years, but I cannot think that 

 this has been a universal failing, or that the species could have long 

 existed in such counties as Berwickshire, in the south of Scotland, or 

 Perthshire, Forfar, or Kincardineshire, without having come under 

 the observation of some capable naturalist in the time. 



I have before treated of the expansion of the nesting haunts of 

 the Stock-Dove in another place, and I take most of the following 

 account from that article down to date.^ 



In the Valley of the Tay we have the earliest positive account of 

 its nesting, when Mr, A. B. Brooke wrote to me as follows: "I first 

 observed the Stock-Dove seven or eight years ago — say 1875 or 1876 — 

 when one flew close past me one day in spring ; but for some time I 

 did not find their nest, and it was not till 1878 that I succeeded in 

 doing so. I sent a note of this to the Ihis (1879, p. 112). I took 

 one of the young birds from the nest, but it escaped out of the cage 

 after I had kept it about a fortnight. In 1879 I was delighted to 

 see the old pair back again, and they again bred in the same rocks, 

 about fifty yards from the site of the old nest, and brought out their 

 young ones, one of which I took when fledged and sent to the Zoo- 

 logical Gardens in London. Their nest was built in a rocky face of a 

 hill, about, I should say, 1000 feet above the level of the sea, in 

 a hole under some rank heather or what was very like a rabbit's 

 old nest." 



Also in Perthshire, Col. Drummond Hay, in his Notes on the 

 Basin of the Tay (1879-80, p. 33), instances several obtained in, or 

 prior to, 1878, including the above, and a bird seen by himself in 

 the Carse of Gowrie, probably breeding in the Glencorse or Bal- 

 thayock woods, and two examples in the southern parts of the county 

 {aud. J. J. Dalgleish) — Forth. Lack of accurate observation, I 

 certainly think, is to blame for the want of more continuous records 

 — say from the date of about 1875 — and not absence of the birds, i.e. 

 between 1875 and 1883. I had indeed learned that these birds had 

 appeared in immense numbers in the Carse of Gowrie in spring 1881 

 (say middle of April), but that in 1882 they were very scarce (G. H. 

 Baxter to the late Mr. J. R. Cook), I do not, of course, go into the 

 particulars of their occurrences in Forth or other parts of Scotland 



^ " On the Stock-Dove [Columba cenas), with remarks on its extension of range in 

 Great Britain." Read Feb. 1883 {Proc. Royal Phys. Soc. Edin., 1883, pp. 241-54). 



