120
NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
similar pellets were also found lying in a rough meadow a few
miles away,
"The rooks continued to roost near their nesting trees until
the beginning of September, when they changed their quarters
to a distant plantation. It seems probable that, though they
cast up pellets chiefly during the nesting season and throughout
the summer, the habit is continued in the winter months. In
Wanstead Park, great numbers of rooks roost in the trees on one
of the islands during the winter. Mr. Puffitt, the head keeper,
tells me that, in hard weather, he has found the ground beneath
the trees strewn with quantities of pellets, one of the chief con-
stituents of which is the india-rubber ring from the neck of
ginger-beer bottles. These are in such numbers that he could
have picked up barrow-loads of them. They are, no doubt,
collected from the sewage-farms of the neighbourhood.
''Pellets are also cast up by other species of Corvidae. In
the Jura district, I found last August numbers of pellets com-
posed of cherry-stones, generally mixed with a few shards of
beetles. These were formed by Carrion Crows, and also, pro-
bably, by Nutcrackers. At Courmayeur, on the south-east side of
Mt. Blanc, I found similar pellets scattered about the tracks.
One unusually large one contained, in addition to cherry-stones
and beetle-shards, the fur and a few bones of a mouse. This
was, in all probability, cast up by one of the Carrion Crows that
were common in the district.
"There is evidence that the pellet-forming habit is shared also
by all members of the Thrush family, by Starlings, by Wood-
pigeons, and by all insectivorous birds and gulls.
"I have lately been visiting Mullion Island, near the Lizard,
a lonely place frequented by hosts of Herring Gulls, and have col-
lected an interesting and very varied set of their pellets. Besides
grain husks and fish bones they seem also to eat, and form
pellets of, horsehair and even of the fibrous bark of the tree-
mallow, which abounds on the island."
In discussing this matter, Mr. Miller Christy, F.L.S., said it
was certainly strange that so little attention should have been
paid by ornithologists to the pellet-ejecting habit of birds.
He knew that many species of birds, other than those
mentioned by Miss Lister, habitually ejected the indigestible
portions of their food in the shape of pellets; and he