STUBBS : THE CORNCRAKE IN ESSEX. 191
alarm note3 ; for it transpired afterwards that, at the very spot,
the female was sitting on eggs, and may well have been
disturbed by a rat or a weasel. When the field was cut late
in June, Mr. A. H. Tozer went to the place and saw the nest ;
and, the following day, his dog was very elaborately befooled
by the artful mother, which, on two occasions, by simulated
lameness, led the animal to the very extremity of the meadow.
On the 24th June, the dog was unlucky enough to catch
two of the nestlings, which were shown to me by Mr. Tozer.
One Mas safely returned, but the other was injured and died,
the skin being preserved as a specimen for the Essex Museum
of Natural History. In life, it may be remarked, the eyes,
beak, and feet of these nestlings were sooty black, the downy
plumage being also black, glossed with brownish bronze.
Mr. Christy makes the very reasonable suggestion that
perhaps this family are the survivors of a local Essex race of
Corncrakes. So far, the only evidence of disparity is that of
voice, and at the moment I can find but few references to this
subject in the literature of birds. My own notes, for Derby-
shire and Lancashire, state clearly that "crake" is uttered
about once a second. In Mr. T. A. Coward's Fauna of Cheshire
(vol. i., p. 367), it is stated that the "disyllabic note is some-
times uttered sixty times per minute." The note is, therefore,
not the single crake, but the double crake-crek ; for this alone
could be called disyllabic. My own remarks are clear that I
myself count each of the paired syllables as a single note. At
any rate, the 1914 Theydon Bois bird said "crake" 90 to the
minute ; and, by 1917, it had reached 112, and was far too
hurried to give the impression of disyllables. Northern birds,
I ought to add, utter their notes in pairs ; and this is recognised
in the iron combs used as calls by old-fashioned gunners, where
a notch in one of the teeth assists the user in making every second
crake about one fourth shorter than the rest. The disyllabic
"crake-crek" is thus, on the Pennines, uttered thirty times
a minute. I feel pretty confident (remembering my first exper-
ience with this Essex bird) that, had I heard a similar cadence
in Wales or Scotland (where I have often encountered the
Corncrake), I must have noticed its dissimilarity to the birds
of north-west England.
3 cf. Cummings and Oldham, Zool., March 1904.