BLUE TITMOUSE — NUTHATCH. 
65 
was three or four years back, when I found the nest in a hole in a rotten branch 
of a tree in Skeffington Wood. The bird was then building, and went on with 
its occupation entirely regardless of me. Seven eggs were eventually laid. 
The Grreat, Blue, and Coal Titmice are by no means so indifferent to the presence 
of spectators when building.” 
In Kutland. — Kesident, but sparingly distributed. 
BLUE TIT310USE. Parus ccerideus, Linnaeus. 
“Blue-cap,” “ Blue Tit,” “Tom-Tit.” 
Resident and common. — Harley recounted how a female Blue Tit, barbarously 
dragged out of her nest in a hole in a plum-tree by means of a stick and wire, 
returned with its mate, when set at liberty, and attacked, in a furious manner, 
the hands of the robber. On 5th June, 1883, Mr. Davenport found a nest of the 
Blue Titmouse, built inside an old nest of the Song-Thrush in a thom-bush at 
Loddington Redditch, containing nine eggs, on which the old bird was sitting hard. 
The Museum possesses a group of nine young ones and the mother bird, taken out 
of a hole in an apple-tree at Aylestone in 1883. Mr. Ingram shewed me a nest, 
built in the mouth of a Faun’s head which formed a decoration on the base of an 
um, in the gardens at Belvoir Castle. Another nest was formed in an ancient 
howitzer in the same grounds. Dr. C. J. Bond wrote me, on 27th June, 1887 : — 
“Walking down Regent’s Road yesterday, I saw a Blue Tit (Tom Tit) perch on 
a lamp-post with a caterpillar in its beak, and then disappear inside the post, 
at the top, where the gas-pipe comes out of the hollow iron post, when I distinctly 
heard the young birds, close to the top. I should hardly have thought the bird 
would have had the hardihood to build within a few inches of a flaring gas-jet, 
and daily visited by the lamplighter with his torch ; they must have had per- 
petual day.” 
In Rutland. — Resident and common. 
Family S I T T I D ^ . 
NUTHATCH. Sitta coesia (Wolf). 
“ Nut-jobber.” 
Resident, and sparingly distributed in wooded districts. — According to Harley, 
it occurs at Bosworth, Bradgate, Croxton, Donington, and Garendon. I have 
found it so near to Leicester as at Knighton, and at Kibworth and Wistow it 
is fairly common. 
Harley once found its nest adroitly concealed in a mortice-hole of a gate-post 
near one of our large woods, and said that at Garendon there was a line walnut- 
tree, standing by the lake near the house, which was used for many years as a 
nesting-place by the Nuthatch, and he remarked, justly enough, that the eggs are 
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