156 
NATURAL HISTORY NOTES AND QUERIES. 
Notes from Aldershot. — It may interest your readers to hear that that 
handsome bird, the grey wagtail, nested this summer on the VVey, near Farnham. 
The butcher bird seems to be very common about here, especially on the 
Hog’s Back. In one of their larders I saw sixteen bumble bees, a red admiral and 
two lizards, one of which had had its tail pulled off — all of them impaled. In 
another larder I saw a frog, a bumble bee, a young bird and the remains of a wren, 
I think. But it is very difficult to find out exactly what there is in the larder, 
because the creatures are distributed in all the thorn trees within fifty yards of the 
nest. 
I see in your March number a note on batsappearing in winter. At Felixstowe, 
on the Suffolk coast, I have them in every month of the year, and I was only there 
for a year, and in almost every case after sunset, though I have occasionally seen 
one early in the afternoon. C. H. T. W. 
A Well-occupied Tree. — The following, I think, is worth recording. 
In the hollows of a small but aged elm-tree, standing in front of a well-known inn 
on the Faringdon road, and within three miles of the town of Abingdon, there 
was, in 1900, the following somewhat queer collection of “happy families,” viz., 
a stock-dove’s nest with young, a jackdaw’s similarly well endowed, two starlings 
with broods of cackling young and, lastly, a nest of five kittens. This year the 
tree has been tenanted for breeding purposes by a pair each of stock-doves, jack- 
daws and starlings. The stock-dove, which is by no means uncommon in the 
woodlands here, is locally known as the “blue rock.” 
Fyfield, near Abingdon. W. H. Warner. 
Is the Water Vole Vegetarian? — When I saw Mr. Norton’s positive 
answer to his own question, “ No, he is not ; I can speak with certainty about 
that,” I rubbed my eyes in doubt as to whether I had ever used them to read 
about the water vole or to look at him. 
All our English rodents — hares and rabbits, perhaps, excepted — are more or 
less omnivorous, and even cannibalistic. The usual diet of the water vole is 
vegetarian, though he will eat a frog or a fish and the like when he has the chance. 
Not long ago I watched a water vole in a shallow pond. He dived several times, 
and on each occasion brought up a thick, succulent piece of grass which he ate 
before my eyes three yards off. A neighbour lately showed me a hole in his 
garden in which some “black-faced” rats lived, and also the havoc they had 
caused among his vegetables. He had caught one and promised to send me 
another. The “black-face” turned out to be a male water vole which had entered 
his garden by a drain. Brown rats and water voles are sometimes mistaken for 
each other. The brown rat’s tail at once distinguishes it from the other, as it is 
much larger and longer. 
Because Mr. Norton’s water voles eat each other it does not prove that they 
are not vegetarians. They are far more vegetarian than the common rat. 
Market Weston, Thetford, Ed.mund Thos. Daubeny. 
July, 1901. 
Field. Mice. — Mr. F. L. Rawlins, Rhyl, refers to field mice on page 95. 
Does he refer to the long-tailed field mouse or the short-tailed field mouse ? The 
former, I presume. If so, the question why these “only sleep one in a bed” 
does not agree with my experience either in bee-hives, potato-clamps or in open 
fields and gardens, where I have frequently disturbed old and young in families 
even full grown. When a lad I used to find out in stubble-fields by the earth 
scratched out where to find a nest of mice, and turn them out for the fun of run- 
ning them down. There is always a back door or second hole of escape, and the 
first thing I did was to stop up one and then follow the other to the nest, and 
when one started, stop in the others until the first was killed or lost, as sometimes 
happened, by its seeking moles’ runs, which, of course, could not be followed up. 
J. Hiam. 
Wild Duck, Indian Cow, Pheasants. — The following have come to 
my notice. — As young pheasants were continually disappearing a watch was set, 
and at last one of the semi-tame wild ducks on an estate was seen^to fly to the 
