NOTES ON THE GIZZARD CONTENTS OF BIRDS. I 43 
the bird hovering over such a spot ? He suddenly descends and 
swoops on his prey. The experts tell us that his staple food 
is mice, voles and beetles. But this time his prey consists of more 
slippery fare—it is a largeslow worm. How do we know this ? 
Because not only was.a chunk of slow worm found intact 
with the pellets, but wrapped up in them were the rounded 
scales, bony plates and vertebre of the same reptile, showing 
that the bird had really digested a portion of the creature. In 
the same pellets may be seen :—The fur of a vole, of a mouse, of a 
bat. Some powdery lumps consist of the jointed hairs of a bat’s 
fur. There are two vole skulls, one rat skull, two bird skulls, a 
small lizard, almost entire, a land snail (Zonites cellarius) and the 
‘iridescent blue and green elytra of beetles. 
This is not a bad record of a varied diet ! 
To return to the slow worm. He may be recognised, even if 
all his bones are comminuted, by means of the presence of in- 
numerable bony plates in the matrix. The slow worm is a lizard 
rather than a snake. It is the only British representative of 
the Family of Lizards known as the Scincid@, which are char- 
acterized by possessing a rigidity of body not found in 
other lizards or in snakes. This feature is due to the presence 
of a framework of bony plates below the scales ; each plate has a 
scale attached to it. In examining the food of the Magpie in 
Mr. Christy’s collection, the bony plates and scales of a small 
slow worm were discovered and identified from the presence of 
these plates. 
Another specially interesting component of the kestrel’s 
pellets was furnished by the hairs of the bat. These when once 
seen are unmistakable. I learned them first in the pellet of a Little 
Owl. Bone-like fragments in the powder of a pellet afforded a 
problem, and I examined the hairs of many spiders and insects 
in vain, till at last a hair was found in a pellet that had escaped 
comminution. With Miss Lister’s help the fragments proved 
to be the broken hairs of a bat. Powdery lumps in the kestrel’s 
pellet have a similar origin. Mr. Witherby, in the Practical 
Handbook of British Birds, says of the kestrel’s food :—‘‘ Quite 
exceptionally bats.” 
In the pellets of the Barn Owls from six localities, the pre- 
dominating food traces are those of shrews, voles, mice and 
sparrows, though there are also remnants of bats and beetles. 
