NATURAL HISTORY NOTES 157 
(Emheriza cilrinella) containing four eggs which were quite fresh, and a friend 
of mine found a woodpigeon's with two eggs, on the 30th of the same month. 
Penzance. Arthur W. Skeat Harvey. 
Late Nesting. — On p. 175 “ VV.” remarks that the beginning of July is late 
for nesting of various birds. Many of the birds breed much later than that. A 
brood of swallows (the second from the same nest) have now, September 6, lately 
left their nest. House-martins have, within the past week, hatched second broods, 
and shells lie about now. Stock-doves are still sitting in my bo.xes out in the 
fields. A pair of linnets have a nest near, and I have no doubt are silting for 
the third brood. J. Hiam. 
Avocet. — One of these beautiful and unfortunately rare waders was shot 
about a dozen miles from here earl)' this spring. It is a great pity, as possibly its 
mate was with it, and the pair might have attempted to breed here, and given 
ornithologists the pleasure of adding, or rather reinstating, its name in the list of 
British breeding birds. 
Penzance. Arthur W. Skeat Harvey. 
Whinchat. — On Friday last I observed a flock of these birds, about a score 
in number. During the summer the whinchat has not been plentiful here, in 
fact, the very reverse of it, but stonechats are abundant. It is a well-known fact 
that where one of these two birds is abundant the other is very scarce. The whin- 
chats which I saw were evidently about to migrate, and were flocking for that 
purpose. Can any reader in the north tell me whether he has noticed the dis- 
appearance of these birds as they make their way south for migration ? 
Penzance. Arthur W. Skeat Harvey. 
Plague of Blackbirds. — On the very day I read Mr. Hiam’s note I came 
across an extract from a paper in the Fruit Grower by Mr. .Kampson Morgan, a 
leading authority on fruit growing, in which he show's that when the birds do eat 
fruit they are by no means so destructive as the caterpillars they destroy, for 
whereas the birds eat only the fruit, the caterpillar permanently injures the tree 
and prevents it yielding afterwards. He says, “ We have sat and watched them 
at their beneficent work, and are satisfied that they destroy millions of caterpillars 
and grubs and butterflies and moths, and in consequence should he cared for. 
From the most selfish point of view it is unwise to destroy the fruit-eating birds 
at any time. ... If they must be kept away when the ripe fruit tempts them, 
then that can be done without destroying them, and a few crumbs . . . will do 
a lot of good.” Mr. Wither.'-poon, a fruit-grower of Chester-le-Sireet, in a leaflet 
published by the Society for the Protection of Birds, bears similar testimony. 
He was trained by his father, a market gardener, to destroy every nest he found, 
but from observations after a very hard winter which destroyed the birds, he 
discovered that they were his best friends, and now feeds them in the winter and 
encourages their breeding near his crops. For six weeks in the year it is neces- 
sary to keep blackbirds, &c. , moving, or to protect fruit with nets. Mr. Aplin 
concludes a leaflet on “ Birds as Labourers : their Work and Wages” thus: — 
“ After all, the wages are very small, the work must be done : only the birds 
can do it. They will never strike, but do not let us try to ‘dock’ their well- 
earned wages or to starve them out in hard times. If we do we may find (when 
it is too late) that w'hen the land ought to have been cleared of weed seeds and 
insects, we were short handed and that the work has been ‘scamped.’ We may 
even, in long-continued hard weather, have to give a little out relief, when work 
and wages alike lie buried under the snow.” 
L. Marshall. 
Parrot.- — Mr. A. E. Sparrow, of Lea, Gainsborough, writes to record that 
a parrot that he has had for fifteen years has just laid an egg. We have, we 
think, heard of similar cases. 
Gnape. — A friend lately returned from Burmah tells me of some Burmese ways 
of catching and curing fish. On the banks of the rivers are numerous paddy- 
fields which, at certain times of the year, are flooded knee-deep for the cultivation 
