Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 4 (1900).djvu/395

Rh for long after a favourite locality, and where a marshman named Trent (now dead) used, I am sorry to say, to shoot a great many. Then there is John Hunt, the Norwich birdstuffer, who remarks that in 1819 there were large flocks at Burlingham (? Surlingham), Norf. and Nor. Nat. Tr. (iii. p. 260); but ten years later we find the same Hunt speaking of it as not common (Stacy, Hist, of Norf.), which the brothers Paget, writing in 1834, qualify into "common in some seasons."

Contemporary with Hunt's second statement is a very descriptive letter from J.D. Hoy to the well-known naturalist Selby, printed in the Norf. and Nor. Nat. Trans, (ii. p. 402), and which was the basis of a lengthy communication to the Magazine of Nat. Hist. 1830, p. 328. Hoy writes to Selby as follows:—

"June 23rd, 1828.—Sir, having been highly gratified in looking over your splendid 'Illustrations of British Ornithology,' and thinking that anything you had not perhaps observed in the habits of some of our birds might not be uninteresting to you, I have ventured to forward you a few observations.....

"I have had several nests of that most beautiful and elegant of our indigenous birds, the Bearded Titmouse. The margins of the extensive pieces of water, called broads, in the south-eastern part of Norfolk, which are skirted with large tracts of reeds, are the favourite abode of this species: its nest is composed, on the outside, with the decayed leaves of the sedge and reed, intermixed with a few pieces of grass, and invariably lined with the top of the reeds in the same manner as the Reed Wren. It is not so compact a nest as the Reed Wren's; the eggs vary in number from four to six, pure white sprinkled all over with small purplish spots, rather confluent at the larger end; full size of the Greater Titmouse. The nest is generally placed in a tuft of grass or rushes near the ground by the side of the water ditches in the fens, sometimes on the broken-down reeds, but never suspended between the reed stems in the manner of the Reed Wren. In the autumn they disperse themselves in little parties along shore, wherever there is an acre or two of reeds; during the winter months they feed entirely on the seed of the reed, and so busily employed are they in searching for their food that I have taken them with a fine bird-lime twig attached to the end of a fishing-rod. When alarmed by any Zool. 4th ser. vol. IV., August, 1900.