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BIRDS OF LEICESTERSHIRE AND RUTLAND. 
WOOD-LAKK. Alauda arborea, Linnaeus. 
I have no knowledge of this bird save that furnished by Harley, who 
said that it appears to be a permanent resident, but is seldom met with except 
in the more retired woodlands. “Around Newtown Linford, Groby, and neigh- 
bouring districts the Wood Lark occurs, but even in such places it is not 
abundant.” 
He further wrote; — “It nestles with us, and builds on the ground in 
corn-fields, and rough places near the sides of thick woods and plantations. 
Never congregates in the winter months, like the Sky-Lark, but remains 
solitary.” 
In Kutland. — No report save that furnished by the Earl of Gainsborough, 
who tells me that IMr. J. Cordeaux saw one flying near Exton in 1888. 
Order PICARI^. 
Sub-order CYPSELI. 
Family CYPSELID^. 
SWIFT. C(/pselus apus (Linmeus). 
“ Devilin,” “Jack Squealer.” 
A summer migrant — nearly the last to arrive and the first to leave — 
commonly distributed, and breeding. — Harley recorded that, in 1842, the Swift 
appeared on the 6th May, and withdrew on the 8th Sept., and that, on 
16th Aug., 1848, during cold and stormy weather, the Swifts withdrew, leaving 
not a single individual of the species where, only a few days before, they were 
abundant ; but on the 24th, 25th, and 26th, numbers returned to his own parish 
and to a small village hard by. During the cold weather of the spring of 1886, 
a correspondent wrote to one of the Leicester papers, under date 15th May : — “As 
an instance of the bitterly cold and wet weather which has prevailed on several 
days during the present week, a friend of mine informs me his brother-in-law, who 
resides in Leicester, saw a man pick up a Swift (Hirundo apus) in the street 
one day this week, and, strange to say, he picked up another in a factory yard 
himself the following day, both being in an exhausted condition from cold and 
want of food.” 
Regarding its nesting Harley wrote : — “ With us this species nests in holes 
in old walls, and in the roofs of dwelling-houses and out-buildings. None of 
the churches in Leicester with which I am acquainted appear to have a colony 
of Swifts, the ugly roofs of the buildings not being at all favourable to the habits 
of the birds.” 
In Rutland. — As in Leicestershire, and breeding, amongst other places, in 
some of the school-houses in the town of Uppingham. 
