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Bewick's Swans in the British Isles in the winters of 1954-55 and 1955-56

01 December 1959 Comments Main paper results of the periods of severe frost in the winters of 1954-55 and 1955-56 were the unprecedented numbers of Bewick's Swans (Cygnus columbianus bewickii) which occurred in Great Britain. The influx in early 1956 was particularly spectacular, and the bir...

Recent reports and News

01 December 1959 Comments News and comment By I. J. FERGUSON-LEES and KENNETH WILLIAMSON T h e i t e m s here are largely unchecked reports, and m u s t not be regarded a s authenticated records. T h e y are selected, on the present w r i t e r s ' j u d g m e n t alone, f r o m s o u r c e s gene...

Notes

01 December 1959 Comments Notes Birds drinking the sap of a birch tree.--On 13th April 1958 I was watching a Marsh Tit (Parus falusiris) feeding at the edge of a deciduous wood at Minsmere in Suffolk when I noticed it return several times to the same place on a tree. At first I thought ...

Pollen contamination of birds

01 December 1959 Comments Main paper of 1957 and 1959 an unidentified substance was found adhering to the bills of four migrant species trapped at Portland Bird Observatory, Dorset. This has now proved to be an accumulation of Citrus pollen, and the following birds have been recorded carryin...

Photographic studies of some less familiar birds: CI. Ross's Gull

01 December 1959 Comments Main paper Photographs and text by J. KlST (Plates 66-69) Ross's GULL (Rhodostethia rosea) is indeed, as Fisher and Lockley (1954) put it, "one of the most mysterious birds of the world". It is also still true that very few ornithologists have seen it alive and so w...

Song Sparrow at Fair Isle

01 December 1959 Comments Open Access By PETER DAVIS and ROY H. DENNIS ON THE EVENING of 27th April 1959, R.H.D. found an unfamiliar small bird--"like a cross between a Hedge Sparrow and a bunting"-- skulking in a tangle of rusty barbed-wire near the derelict radarstation on Ward Hill, Fai...

Obituary: Arnold Whitworth Boyd (1885-1959)

01 December 1959 Comments Obituaries IN A NOTE in the third volume of British Birds, the late T. A. Coward mentioned some ducks seen at Marbury Mere in Cheshire on 10th April 1910 by one A. W. Boyd, and during the space of nearly 50 years which has passed since then only three volumes--two i...

Letters

01 February 1952 Comments Letters SIRS,--In your September issue (antea, vol. xliv, p. 314) is a sight record by Mr. D. D. Harber oi a "Sooty Shearwater" seen off the Sussex coast, "some way out" to sea. The bird is described simply as " a large, all-black shearwater with a rather heavy b...

Reviews

01 February 1952 Comments Reviews Grenlands Fugle. Part II. By Finn Saiomensen. Illustrated by GitzJohansen. (Munksgaard, Copenhagen, 1951. 66s.). The second part of this important work deals with the Ptarmigan, the waders, skuas and galls and the Arctic Tern; as its prohibitive cost and ...

Supplementary Notes

01 February 1952 Comments Main paper As foreshadowed in an Editorial published in May, 1951 (antea, vol. xliv, p . 146), we propose to use this heading for a list of notes which either supplement information given in The Handbook or give further instances of behaviour already fully reported ...

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