Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/281

Rh in the year, the young being hatched before many other birds have laid their eggs.—]

—Being in Aberdeen recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the Free Church College Museum, where I observed, in a case (said to contain birds of the locality), a splendid specimen of the Bearded Tit. On asking the keeper, Mr. Beaveridge, about its claim to be there, he told me that he himself had shot it at a place called Monymush, in the County of Aberdeen. I mention this fact because in all works on Ornithology to which I have access I find it stated that the Bearded Tit is not found in Scotland. In the same case I also noticed a fine Hawfinch, and was delighted to hear that it was procured in the same district as the Tit, and by the same individual.— (Banff).

[The Bearded Tit is included in Don's 'Fauna of Forfarshire' (1813), and a writer in Loudon's 'Magazine of Natural History' for 1830 states that he saw a bird of this species at Inchannan, in Renfrewshire, where the River Gryfe joins the Clyde. These are the the only records known to us of the occurrence of this bird in Scotland. As regards the Hawfinch, although unknown in the West of Scotland, it occurs in the southern and eastern counties, where it has been traced from Dumfriesshire to East Lothian, thence to Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, and Caithness, in all of which counties several specimens have been obtained. See Gray's 'Birds of the West of Scotland,' p. 144.—]

—I think a statement of Mr. Mitchell's, in the 'Zoologist' for May is calculated to convey an erroneous impression. He states that the nests of the Brambling "are usually placed in the birch trees at heights of from four to eight feet, and the number of eggs never more than four." I have found several nests at double the greatest height mentioned, and I think the birds must have been laying when Mr. Mitchell found his nests, as, out of nine nests found by myself and friends in Norway only one contained so few as four eggs, and the bird was not sitting. The other nests contained respectively five, five, five, five, six, six, seven, and eight eggs. One of these nests may possibly have been a Chaffinch's.— (Alderley Edge).

—Some time ago a parishioner of mine (Mr. John Gay Attwater), a keen observer of Nature, was walking by the side of the river, when he was attracted by the gambols of a newly hatched brood of Moorhens with their mother. While he was watching them the parent bird gave its peculiar sharp cry of warning, and the young ones scuttled under the friendly shelter of the bank in various directions. On looking about to discover the cause of alarm, he perceived a Stoat on the opposite bank of the stream to that to which the Moorhens had fled for shelter, which was sniffing up the air in