86 BIRD LIFE ON ISLAND AND SHORE 
During our first day’s wallowing in the mire 
we got the new nests of four pairs of Banded 
Rail, in every case with eggs broken and destroyed. 
During our second day one nest was discovered 
containing whole eggs; they were cold and wet, 
the feathers scattered thick about the nest’s edge, 
showing where the bird had been seized. During 
the third day four nests were obtained, each of 
them containing eggs freshly sucked. During the 
fourth day two nests were found with eggs newly 
laid and broken. On a later expedition we got 
eight more new nests containing broken shells. 
Our total bag was twenty-one nests of the Banded 
Rail, the eggs of eighteen of which had been 
destroyed by rats. 
When our search began we had instinctively 
avoided the vicinity of settlers’ houses. Before 
it had ended those rush beds in the propinquity 
of cottages and roads were discovered to be the 
most likely spots. Only three nests were obtained 
whole, sound, and warm, and each of these un- 
spoiled clutches was in close proximity to human 
settlement, two of them near to settlers’ houses, 
the third within a chain of the roadside. Nothing 
indeed could prove more incontestably the damage 
done by rats than thus to discover that the house- 
hold cat had actually become a protection to this 
small species, a fact the more remarkable because 
of the cat’s partiality for the smaller Rails. Not 
