OUSTED HOME-SEEKERS.
It is hard to explain why some sorts of birds have such an exclusive taste in nest-building sites. Why should the Kentish plover only nest at Dungeness and the roseate tern only on this spot and that ? It has recently been argued that the barn owl—most beneficent and attractive of the family of owls—is rapidly disappearing because he demands the old-fashioned barn or unprotected church tower for his home. In my experience he likes best a hollow walnut ; but never in my experience has the competition for such hollows been so fierce. It is recorded by the R.S.P.B. that in a certain wood every woodpecker was ousted by starlings, and that in reference to one desirable hollow, first occupied by a pair of wood- peckers, twenty-one marauding starlings were shot ; but that, nevertheless and notwithstanding, in the end a pair took possession and left the woodpeckers homeless. I have found this year an unconscionable number of starlings' eggs laid on the ground or dropped on the ground ; I am inclined to think that many pairs—so numerous are they—never find a nesting
place at all. * * * *
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