24 CHIFFCHAFF 
crests, with perhaps one or two Chaffinches or Great Tits, 
wander fitfully through them, their thin jarring notes falling 
constantly on the ear, and their movements showing all the 
careless familiarity characteristic of this tiny bird. In the 
larger fir-woods, such as those at Skyhill, Injebreck, ‘ Laxey 
Glen, and Rhenass, it is very abundant; but almost every 
little clump of timber has its inhabitants, and they flit 
along the alder and gorse bushes by the stream sides, 
through the ash-trees about the ruined cottage, amid the 
lilacs and fuchsias on the cottage frontage in the village 
street, or the foreign pine-tree on the lawn of the villa in 
the suburbs of the town. In summer they are perhaps less 
common, yet their nest is found in many localities, Mr. 
Graves found a nest built under a witch’s broom on a birch 
at Thornton, Douglas. A few are reported both in spring and 
autumn at Langness and the Chickens, and once at Douglas 
Head, but they do not appear numerously at our lights. 
In September I have seen them among the stone walls and 
bare coast-rocks of Scarlett, searching their crevices for 
insects, as in a wood they search the branches and foliage. 
Generally distributed in Britain. In Galloway and 
Cumberland the Goldcrest is most numerous in winter, and 
the same applies to Ireland, where, however, it is at all 
seasons very common, more so than in England. It 
migrates over Orkney and Shetland, in the former of which 
it has bred; stragglers only reach the Outer Hebrides. 
PHYLLOSCOPUS RUFUS (Bechstein). 
CHIFFCHAFF. i ee 
A too hasty remark by the writer in the Zoologist of 1892 
on the absence of the Chiffchaff drew from Mr. C. B. Moffat 
the statement (p. 146) that on 18th April 1882 he had 
