THE HOOPOE
`My husbapd and I both saw a hoopoe in Withing- ton Wood, between Cirencester and Cheltenham, last Friday,' says a corrrespondent.1 saw it on the ground and my husband and I both saw it fly away. We are home on leave from Kenya, where we often have them in our garden, and so there can be no doubt whatever that this was a hoopoc, as we both saw it clearly. I gather that they have been seen in Englind on quite a number of occasions, but possibly not as far north as this?' Hoopoes have never come my way, and I have had to rely on books for what acquaintance I have of them. T. A. Coward in The Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs, published thirty-seven years ago, remarked, `Not only is it a passage migrant in spring and autumn, but it would be a regular summer visitor to England if stupid and greedy collectors and gunners would leave it alone.' A more recent work, The Pocket Guide to British Birds, by R. S. Fitter, published by Collins in 1952, says of the hoopoe's range and status, `Annual spring visitor in very small numbers, much scarcer in autumn, to S. and E. England and S. Ireland, especially on coast; rare vagrant elsewhere; has occasionally bred in S. England as far north as Bucks.' Hoopoes nesting or visiting are rare enough and T. A. Coward com- mented that the bird had been trying to establish itself in this country for two and a half centuries.
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