37
NOTES: ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
Essex Records of the Man Orchid.—In Mr. George C. Brown's article
on "Some Extinct and Disappearing Essex Wild Flowers" in the Essex
Review for January, 1939, he mentions that the Man Orchid, Aceras
anthropophora, is extremely rare in the County and tending to vanish
altogether. It was first found in Britain between Belchamp St. Paul
and Ovington. Specimens gathered in 1715 at Ballingdon, Belchamp St.
Paul and Belchamp Walter are in the National Herbarium. Only two
later records from Essex are known, one from near Southend in 18358 and
one collected at Terling in 1909, now in the Druce Herbarium at Oxford.
There is substantial evidence that the Terling specimen was that
found by me : it was submitted to the late Rev. Canon Vaughan, who
was a friend of Dr. Claridge Druce, and seems to have passed to the latter,
with most of Canon Vaughan's herbarium, after his decease. Another
specimen, gathered at Terling on June 4th, 1892, was given by me to the
Club's herbarium at Stratford last year. These are the only specimens
ever gathered by me, as I did not wish to help to exterminate this rarity.
Edwin E. Turner.
Herons Visiting a Suburban Garden.—At my request my friends
Mrs. A. H. Wright and Miss Wright, of 31, Monkhams Avenue, Woodford
Green, have sent me the following account of two visits they have had from
herons in their small garden. At the back of their house, and 10 feet from
it, is a shallow oval pool, measuring 9 feet by 4 feet 6 inches, into which
four years ago they put a few goldfish; two years later more were added
seven in all. These fish were quite seven inches long; they came to be
regarded almost as personal friends. "Early one morning in April, 1939,
we heard a pair of jackdaws making a great commotion in the garden and
saw they were chasing a heron; later we discovered all our goldfish had
disappeared. On March 27th this year, about 6 p.m., we were aware of
two herons circling round and round near the pool, one of them quite
low down, but there were no fish for them. We think that one of them
was probably the thief who remembered his good breakfast of the year
before." G. Lister
Badger at Romford.—On the afternoon of Sunday, May 5th,
my attention was attracted by the curious behaviour of our cat, which
would "point" persistently at a thick clump of Chinese Honeysuckle
bordering the wall of the front garden, and on peering under the bushes
I discerned the head and shoulders of a large Badger. Beyond backing
slightly when I called in a few neighbours and a local policeman to view
him, the creature seemed quite unafraid, and it was in the same position
when viewed by torchlight at 10.30 p.m. What struck me in particular
was the effect of the white stripes on the animal's head, especially in the
half-gloom under the bushes. The eye of the observer instinctively fixes
on the stripes and the rest of the animal is not seen, and might easily be
8 This record (mentioned by Gibson in his Flora of Essex, 1862) was made by Edward Forster
in one of his MS. notebooks, now in the British Museum: the record reads ''Ophrys anthropo-
phora on South Shoebury Common, Essex, 1835."—Editor.