Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 6 (1902).djvu/54

28 were quite different, being made in the reeds, and were constructed by twining them in and out until a small platform was made about eight or ten inches in width, and about five or six inches high. These nests were never lined, and must have been, as Mr. Pike says, used as a roosting-place for the young birds. I think the strangest circumstance is that they were built so differently from the real nest, and Mr. Pike does not say whether he noticed this point or not. It is a well-known fact that Wrens build a number of false nests, very much after the fashion of the Moor-hen; but I have never heard of these being used for any purpose. The Rev. J.C. Atkinson, writing in 'The Zoologist' (1844), p. 767, on the second nests of these birds, says, occasionally constructed "to accommodate a moiety of its young when they have attained a size too large to permit the original one to contain them all. And when the colony is sent to the second nest, one of the old birds accompanies it. An instance of this habit occurred in the vicinity of my father's residence when I was last at home. The female Moorhen was the architect, and the subsidiary nest she busied herself in constructing was built on a bough overhanging the water." Mr. Atkinson, in his little book on Birds, Nests, and Eggs, also records this fact. (Lismore, Windsor, Belfast).

Unusual Nest of the Ringed Plover (Ægialitis hiaticula).—Scores of Ringed Plovers nest on the gravel sea-banks which nearly surround a four hundred-acre farm in the neighbourhood of Portsmouth, some-