158 
NATURE NOTES 
hand, feed and swim together, attended by their devoted mother, even when 
nearly full grown. 
Young Thrush feeding others. —About eight weeks ago we caught a 
young thrush, which we trained. Later on we caught two more very young 
birds, and for some time the first young one would feed the other two. Such a 
thing I have never known or heard of before in bird life, and so thought it might 
interest your readers. 
The Cedars , Sion Hill , Bath. Andrew M. Pooi.ev. 
Corn-crake. — The Rev. G. P. Griffiths, of St Mark’s, Cheltenham, gives 
the following anecdote in his parish magazine for July : — “ In cutting some grass, 
within twenty yards of our back door, we came upon a corncrake’s nest with five 
eggs in it. The nest and eggs were laid absolutely bare. I went and looked at 
them, and was very sorry that we had disturbed it, however unintentionally. We 
did not, however, touch them nor move anything around them, but left them in 
their bareness. Later on in the day, when I went again, the nest was there, but 
the eggs were all gone ; we could not tell what had become of them, but looking 
around a foot or more from the nest, we found the eggs all collected together 
under a heap of the new mown grass. The bird had evidently rolled each egg 
from its exposed situation and then gathered them all into another extemporised 
nest under the hay.” 
Blue-tit. — A blue-lit (locally, willow-biter) has built a nest in a letter-box 
belonging to Mr. Palmer of Frithville. The letter-box, which serves for three 
houses, stands two feet from the roadside, being fixed on a board set-up by the 
hedgerow. The bird enters by a slit 3 by in. and often sits with the letters 
on its back. It has laid several eggs in a snug hole in the mound of moss with 
which it has filled the box. Two years ago it laid twelve eggs in this same box, 
hatching ten of them, but some boys found it out and stirred it up with a stick, 
with disastrous results to the young birds. The influence of a protective society 
is needed here ; a magpie and a cuckoo have been recently shot in the district and 
thirty sand martins’ burrows plugged up with mud. 
Boston, Lines. W. C. C. 
Jays. — I have just witnessed a — to me — novel bit of hawking in the shape of a 
jay trying to catch a bird upon the wing, evidently a fledgling whose flying 
powers were slight. At best a jay is a poor performer in the open, and this one’s 
attempts to turn and twist in pursuit of its prey were even more ridiculous than 
those of a flock of starlings when catching flies. Several times did the jay over- 
shoot the mark and clumsily turn round to make another snap at its victim in mid 
air. Meanwhile, the poor little bird held bravely, though slowly, on for a hun- 
dred yards or so, but at last lost heart, and flopped down on the grass, where it 
was at once captured and devoured. 
Market Weston, 
Thetford. 
Is the Blackbird Imitative ? — 
I think the bird’s phrase begins — or is — 
more like this than like part of the boys’ 
bugle-call. Nevertheless we were both 
struck with the bird’s call. 
S. P. Hawes. 
36, Quarry Road, Hastings. 
Queensland Hornets. — In the April number of Nature Notes there is 
an article on hornets which very much surprised me. I have watched the 
manners and customs of what we call hornets here in Queensland for many years 
and have never found them preying upon bees. Having very frequently hit them 
as they fly it has always been a larva they let fall, and in the nests we have 
broken open we have found nothing but larvae and spiders. One large black and 
gold kind brings in green crickets as large as itself, but its nest, always under 
the floor, I have not been able to find. This season, with the aid of my youngest 
son, I began to makc a collection and have succeeded in getting, of hornets 91 
Edmund Thos. Daubeny. 
-F2 rrr 
r-T 
V 
