of young swallows and martins. I observed no old birds of either of the last species, as my attention was mostly directed to the swifts. It was a bright sunny day and very wann; I could not have been mistaken in the birds, as they played round our heads whilst we stood looking at them for a considerable time after I had pointed them out to my companion, Mr. C. Rippingall.—E.W. Dowell; Jesus College, Cambridge, February 3, 1843.
Note on the occurrence of the Orange-legged Hobby. As I perceive that your pages are open to notices of rare British species, you will perhaps give insertion to the two following instances of the occurrence of the orange-legged hobby (Falco rufipes),[1] earlier than any mentioned by Mr. Yarrell, to whom I neglected to communicate them in time for their appearance in his work.
When I was at school in Wiltshire in 1825, I bought a small hawk from a countryman, who said he had seen it pursued and struck down by a raven in Littlecote Park near Hungerford. He caught it on the ground before it recovered, and according to his account it laid an egg after its fall, which was broken. I was a tolerable ornithologist for a school-boy, but the yellow claws and strange markings of my bird puzzled me to identify it with any of the English hawks, and I made a drawing of it, sufficiently accurate to recognise it by. It was fortunate I did so, for the bird, which was very wild and untameable, escaped after a few days' captivity, and w T as probably killed, as it had one wing clipped. Some years after, on showing the sketch at Oxford to Mr. N. C. Strickland, he recognised it as identical with one of which he had a drawing, taken from a bird shot several years before in Yorkshire; but neither he nor I knew the species, till we saw the bird in the Zoological Gardens. Both these specimens were females. I may notice one character which I never saw expressed in any figure — the lower bars on the tail being forked or divided at the side. Gould's plate shows only the under side of the tail of the female, in which position this is not visible.
The white or yellowish claws are usually considered as confined to this species and the lesser kestril (Falco tinnunculoides); but I once had a tame kestril (F. tinnunculus), in which two claws on each foot had become white in the course of several years, and the others were beginning to change their colour when the bird died.—Frederick Holme, M.A., F.Z.S.; C.C.C. Oxford, January 29, 1843.
Note on the occurrence of the Cassian Heron, (Ardea comata).[2]
