NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED
119
Osprey in Essex.—An Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) appeared
in this park [Weald Hall, Brentwood] from October 11th till the
24th, 1903. When it first came it was very tame, coming and
taking some golden carp out of a pond in the garden, where some
gardeners were at work. Afterwards, it generally took up a
position on the dead bough of a tree on an island in the lake,
where it was generally mobbed by rooks, for whom, however, it
seemed to have a supreme contempt. There is absolutely no
doubt about its identity. It was, of course, protected, and
notice was given about so that it should not be shot.
An Osprey, presumably the same bird with more mature
plumage, came again the following year, staying about a week.
—Christopher J. H. Tower, in British Birds, 1909, p. 383.
Pellets cast up by Rooks. —At the meeting of the Club on
9th December 1909, Miss Gulielma Lister, F.L.S., read a note
on this subject and exhibited a collection of pellets. She said:—
"The fact that Rooks have this habit has received little
notice in our ornithological works. Mr. Cecil Smith writes1:—
'Rooks seem occasionally to cast up pellets of the indigestible portion of
what they have eaten, after the manner of hawks, so I suppose their digestion is
not quite equal to everything. One of these pellets which I saw a rook cast up,
and which I examined, consisted of stones, hard parts of beetles, and husks of
corn.'
Most writers are, however, silent on the subject.2
"My attention was drawn to this matter last July (1909),
when visiting a large rookery in the neighbourhood of Hitchin,
where the ground under the trees in which the birds roosted was
strewn with hundreds of pellets. Many of these were freshly
formed, and were so fragile as to be often broken by their
fall to the ground. They averaged an inch and a quarter
in length by three quarters of an inch in breadth, and were com-
posed mainly of the husks of oats, mixed with a few fragments
of chalk and brick, but occasionally contained small snail-
shells (Helix caperata and Pupa secale) and the remains of
centipedes and weevils. The oat grains themselves were much
broken up, and only minute fragments of the endosperm
remained, mixed with grit, adhering to the husks. A few
1 See Dresser's Birds of Europe, art. "Rook," p. 6.
2 Prof. Newton, for instance, appears not to refer to the habit in his Dictionary of Birds.
(Ed).