4 Nursery of Duaaards. 
My Ribbon Finches had a nest, and the first I knew of it 
was seeing- these young- birds sitting- on a branch and crying to 
be fed. 
<-M^> 
A Nursery of Buzzards. 
Rc[<nnlcd from " The Times," sS. v. i8.; cutting per Rev. G. //. Raynor, 
M.A.—Ed. 
From a Correspondent. 
" Rare Birds- at Home : Natural history books still speak of the 
" common buzzard, as though it were one of the familiar objects of the 
" country, but in the experience of most people the epithet has a s:itiric?i 
" sound. Whatever the buzzard may have been in times past, he is far 
" from common now. Game-preservers have persecuted him and driven 
" him from his old breeding haunts, and what the game-keeper began the 
" professional egg-collector has zealously continued. Let the eggs of any 
" British bird once become entitled to the positive label of rare and they 
" quickly progress, through the comparative very rare, towards the ."iuper- 
" lative extinct. The kite, as a breeding .species, trembles on the verge of 
" this last, the buzzard is, perhaps, to be generally classified as Grade 2. 
" In some parts of mid-Wales , however, the buzzard holds hi;; own, 
" and even shows signs of increasing in numbers, but those who have the 
" secret of a buzzard's nursery are wisely chary of imi)arting their know- 
" ledge to a greedy and r;ipacious world. Hence the present writer does 
" not intend to advertise the locality where he spent a day last week 
" In a wilderness of rounded hills, br-ght olive green now With the 
" voung leaves of whinberry, there lies a certain deep and narrow valley 
" (^n one side the native rock crops out in a series of bold crags, so hot 
" and sun-baked that, though they are a refuge for the coneys, the more 
" meditative coneys must sometimes think of roast rabbit. From the foot 
" of the rocks a moraine of slaty detritus slopes steeply to a little moun 
" tain stream that foam.') down a succession of mimic waterfalls, through 
" cushions of mossy sa.xifrage and delicate fringes of Cystopteris fragiiit 
" The place is a solitude given up to the mountain-sheep and the bees in 
" the whinberry blossom. 
" The valley is practically treeless, but, at one point where a smad 
" tributary runs down to the main stream, the hill-side on the left opens 
" unexpectedly and discloses a sheltered hollow, of considerable size, which 
" has once been planted with larch. This experiment in forestry has not 
" proved a success, for not more than some 30 trees have survived, anj 
" th"v .'ire never likely to be worth felling as timber. Thev slope at odd 
