I was intrigued (well, mildly interested, anyway) in a snippet on BBC Radio 4 yesterday from Dr Andrew Lack who mentioned a story of a robin building a nest in a 'bullet hole' in the mast of the Victory in the 1830s.
It turns out there is some truth in this, and the 'bullet' was a cannon shot that passed clean through the mast. However, he did omit to mention that the mast was no longer on board the Victory when the robins moved in! For the story as reported in 1900, complete with some very erroneous detail, see here:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-fr ... 946197D6CF