MR. T. SOUTHWELL ON THE BEARDED SEAL (PIIOCA BARBATA). 555 
a little sleight of hand, the eggs could be dexterously slid. 
Choughs’ eggs are greyish white, spotted with pale brown, but 
Mr. Ussher does not consider that Irish eggs are equal to Spanish 
ones in beauty. 
Another nest had been deserted three years, yet seemed intact 
and in excellent preservation. It was situated in the roof of 
a cavern twenty-five feet from the floor, and eighty feet from the 
entrance, close, damp, and dotted with tufts of Sea Spleenwort. 
This nest was quite a .Jackdaw like pile, twelve inches in diameter, 
but Mr. Jameson, who was one of our party, made it more; and inside 
it was soven, good measurement, and the depth of it twenty inches. 
It was composed of sticks, in the first place a foundation of gorse 
stems, beginning with thick ones and getting smaller, then heather 
stems of sizes were intertwined, and there was a fragment of moss 
and some bracken. In another nest, in Mr. Ussher’s collection, 
were a stem of blackthorn and a piece of ash ; doubtless, they 
pick up whatever comes handy, and for the lining they use wool. 
The Royal Osmunda Fern and the Seapink, which help to render 
Ireland’s romantic cliffs so pretty, may contribute materials also. 
III. 
ON THE OCCURRENCE OF THE BEARDED SEAL 
(PIIOCA BARBATA) ON THE NORFOLK COAST. 
By T. Southwell, F.Z.S., President. 
Read Sid October, 1S93. 
On the 10th December, 1892, Mr. II. Laver of Colchester, very 
kindly informed me that a living Seal, the species of which he could 
not recognise, was being exhibited in that town by a man named 
Hudson, from Lynn, but which from its hairy muzzle he suggested 
might be Pliocu barbata. The description Mr. Laver gave me of 
the animal was briefly as follows : — Five to six feet long ; sex, male ; 
skin, black, with only a few hairs on the shoulders, which were 
otherwise quite bare ; head remarkably narrow and flat, suddenly 
