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BIRDS TAKING RUBBER ARTICLES.
By WILLIAM GLEGG, F.Z.S., M.B.O.U.
I HAVE made no special search for this communication, and
base my remarks on those instances which have come to
ray notice. The earliest account of which I have knowledge,
is not unsuitably Essex, and it is appropriate that it should have
been made by one who played such an important part in the
ornithology of the County. In his Birds of Essex the late
Mr. Miller Christy writes that during winter many thousands of
Rooks used to roost in the trees in which the Herons built at
Birch, and when he visited the locality on April 16, 1888, he found
the ground below the trees strewn with small fragments of white
and red brick, "disgorged by the Rooks in their pellets. Old
"rubber bands gathered by the birds from the Colchester and
"London manure are not uncommon." At a meeting of the
Club on December 9, 1909, Miss G. Lister, during the course of
remarks on pellets cast by Rooks, touched on the habit now
under consideration. She related that great numbers of Rooks
roosted during winter in the trees on one of the islands in
Wanstead Park. She had been informed by the head keeper
that in hard weather he had found the ground beneath the trees
strewn with pellets, of which one of the chief constituents was
india-rubber rings from the necks of ginger-beer bottles. They
were in such numbers that he could have collected barrow-loads
of them. At this same meeting Mr. Jonathan Seabrook gave
confirmatory evidence. In his garden at Grays he had often
seen pellets containing portions of rubber rings. The pellets had
been cast by Rooks. Mr. P. Thompson, writing in 1922, states
that the specimens of rubber rings from ginger-beer bottles and
rubber bands in the Essex Museum, from Wanstead Park, were
picked up beneath the nests, but were not actually contained in
the pellets. He expresses his views in the following passage:
"Whether these articles are actually swallowed by the Rooks
"on account of their supposed food-value or merely collected
"by them because of the attraction of their bright red colour, is
"a doubtful point." Mr. Thompson also states that pellets
found under high trees are usually flattened, or even shattered,
on dropping to the ground. Miss A. Hibbert-Ware contributed
further information of the habit from Wanstead Park. Beneath