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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...

Variations in Chaffinch Song

01 August 1943 Comments Main paper WORKING at first with four birds (A, B, C and D) I made the following observations on the songs of Chaffinches (FringiUa c. gengleri) in a coastal area of south Devon during the spring of 1942. B and C held adjacent territories and their songs were inter...

An Examination of incubation in its wider aspects based on Observation in North Cornwall

01 August 1943 Comments Main paper IT is my purpose here to examine the subject of incubation on a wider scale than in my first paper (antea, pp. 10-16). The present article must be regarded as a second chapter--or indeed a concluding chapter to the first. There I tried to draw the distinc...

Review

01 August 1943 Comments Reviews A Study of the Little Owl (Athene noctua) in New Zealand. By B. J. Marples. Trans. R. Soc. of New Zealand, Vol. 72, Part 3, pages 237-252, December, 1942 . M R . MARPLES undertook, in 1938, to make a thorough investigation of t h e Little Owl from every p...

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