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September reports

01 December 1974 Comments News and comment These are largely unchecked reports, not authenticated records. September was, like August, dominated by weather from the North Atlantic, as a seemingly unending series of deep depressions crossed Ireland and Britain. Severe gales occurred early in the...

News and comment

01 December 1974 Comments News and comment The Great Oystercatcher Robbery For the second successive winter the Ministry of Agriculture and the South Wales Sea Fisheries Committee are organising a major cull among Oystercatchers wintering in the Burry Inlet, south Wales. This is being d...

Reviews

01 December 1974 Comments Reviews The Seabirds of Britain and Ireland. By S. Cramp, W. R. P. Bourne and D. Saunders. Collins, London, 1974. 287 pages; four colour and eight black-and-white plates; 32 maps, linedrawings. £3.50. This long-awaited book gives an excellent survey o...

Letters

01 December 1974 Comments Letters Eye colour of the Hen Harrier D. I. M. Wallace's remarks (Brit. Birds, 65:358-359) on the eye colour of an immature of the American subspecies of the Hen Harrier Circus cyaneus hudsonius at Cley, Norfolk (see Brit. Birds, 64: 537-542), were confusing a...

Notes

01 December 1974 Comments Notes Hen Harriers' hunting behaviour in south-west Scotland Hen Harriers Circus cyaneus are generally regarded as solitary hunters. For example, J. J. and F. C. Craighead (1956, Hawks, Owls and Wildlife) found that in winter Marsh Hawks C. c. hudsonius had ...

Studies of less familiar birds: 174 Shore Lark and Temminck's Horned Lark

01 December 1974 Comments Main paper Photographs of Shore Larks Eremophila alpestris last appeared in this journal as long ago as 1952 (Wood 1952). Circumstantial evidence of probable breeding in the Scottish Highlands in 1972 and 1973 (Watson 1973) makes this an appropriate moment to pub...

The Voice of the Barn Owl

01 December 1974 Comments Main paper In their descriptions of the voice of the Barn Owl Tyto alba, the majority of books make no more than vague mention of eerie screams, hisses and snores, with perhaps some reference to the twittering sounds that can be heard at closer quarters. Apart fr...

Post-fledging behaviour of Choughs on Bardsey Island

01 June 1962 Comments Main paper T H E C H O U G H S {Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) of Bardsey Island, off the coast of Caernarvonshire, have been a constant source of interest since the bird observatory opened there in 1953. O n e or two pairs have nested in most years and forty-seven young ...

Robin recaptures on Fair Isle

01 June 1962 Comments Main paper O N F A I R ISLE, Shetland, it is the normal practice to weigh all migrant birds at the time they are first trapped, and at any subsequent recaptures. The information is stored in a card-index, with all the data for each individual on a single card. In th...

Albinism and melanism in birds

01 June 1962 Comments Main paper T H E STUDY OF heterochtosis or colour variations in the plumage of birds is a subject that the majority of field ornithologists either ignore entirely or regard with only mild curiosity. In the early years of the present century and before that, however,...

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