. Birds of Great Britain and Ireland, Order Passeres, complete in two volumes . lonas and walnuts ; next to which, mutton suet is their favourite food ; thesedainties they will eat almost immediately after their capture; although, for the firstday or so. Great Tits spend most of their time in hammering at the wire andwoodwork of their prison : pretty as they are, it is wrong to shut them up; theirnature is far too wild. In May, 1886, I tried hand-rearing Ox-eyes: there were four of them, whichhad formed part of a family hatched in a hollow plum-tree ; I found them quarrel-some above all nestli
. Birds of Great Britain and Ireland, Order Passeres, complete in two volumes . lonas and walnuts ; next to which, mutton suet is their favourite food ; thesedainties they will eat almost immediately after their capture; although, for the firstday or so. Great Tits spend most of their time in hammering at the wire andwoodwork of their prison : pretty as they are, it is wrong to shut them up; theirnature is far too wild. In May, 1886, I tried hand-rearing Ox-eyes: there were four of them, whichhad formed part of a family hatched in a hollow plum-tree ; I found them quarrel-some above all nestlings, clamorous, and voracious; their call for food was clnir-chur-chur-chur, chiir: they lived long enough to fly, and were becoming quite * The young are feil largely on green caterpillars, and I have watched a pair for a considerable limeincessantly travelling backwards and forwards from their nest to a plantation of currant and gooseberry bushes,each time bringing a mouthful of the calerjiillars of the destructive lilllc loojiing caterpillar of the V-motlialalia The Coal-Tit. 151 interesting, when suddenly they all died off within two days; having probablyswallowed some wadding from their bed, in their greediness after food droppedupon it. Family—PARID^. The Coal-Tit. Parus atcr, LiNN. DR. SHARPE has separated the British race of this species under the nameof P. britmmicus on account of the olive-brown tint of its upper back;but it would appear that the Continental form also occurs in GreatBritain, as well as intermediate grades between the grey and brown-backed a matter of fact these differences, if they were constant, would be trifling ascompared with the far more defined local variations of our Yellow-Hammer, themale Kentish bird in breeding plumage differiug from that of some parts ofSurrey, almost as much as a Saffron-finch does from a Greenfinch. On the Contineut the Coal-Tit is generally distributed and resident throughoutCentral and Southern Eur
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