Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/78

52 following, my friend Capt. Dover shot a beautiful male Eider near Bartragh, and he thought it probably might have been the companion bird of the one I shot, which had disappeared from the river shortly after I had last seen them together on the 12th of May. Both specimens are now in the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society. The Eider Duck is of very rare occurrence on the Irish coast, and especially so on this part of it, these being the first of the species that I have met with, although I have been shooting on the estuary here every winter for many years past; and Thompson, in his 'Birds of Ireland,' mentions only three specimens of this bird as having been obtained in Ireland—one, a fine male, obtained near Ballbriggan, on the Dublin coast, in May, 1840, and two others shot on the Mayo coast in January, 1842.— (Moyview, Ballina, Co. Mayo).

— A considerable number of the Lesser Tern bred last season on the Landguard Fort Common, Felixstow. This no doubt is attributable to the protection now afforded them by Act of Parliament. Amongst the wading birds and sea-fowl shot during August and September last on the Dovrecourt beach, on the flats of the river Stour, the salt-marshes at Ramsay, and other places on the east coast, were Knots, Sanderlings, Green Sandpipers, Greenshanks, Curlew Sandpipers, Temminck's Stints, Red-necked and Gray Phalaropes. A Little Gull also was killed on the Dovrecourt beach on August 24th, and a Sandwich Tern on the Pye Sand on September 12th. On August 23rd two Kentish Plovers were seen, and one of them was shot on the beach at Dovrecourt. A Common Skua was obtained just outside Harwich Harbour on September 12th, and a female Eider Duck in the River Orwell on the 28th October. During the week ending November 4th a great number of Short-eared Owls were killed in the neighbourhood of Harwich. Between the 6th and 10th of that month seven Purple Sandpipers were shot on the stone breakwater, Harwich; while last, though not least, a Spoonbill was shot on the mud-flats of the River Stour on October 20th, by a wild-fowler named Porter, who unfortunately consigned the bird to the spit.— (The Bank, Harwich).

—On the 22nd October last a Dotterell was observed on the downs in this parish by a parishioner whose accuracy I can vouch for: he whistled to it as it flew past him, and it settled some distance off in the same track he was pursuing, when he rose it a second time. The Dotterel is annually getting rarer, I am sorry to say, on our Wiltshire Downs; but they are still occasionally seen on the Plain near Salisbury, both in spring and autumn, though not so regularly or in such numbers of late years as formerly. But I am glad to be able to assert that they still form one of that group of comparative rarities in the ornithological catalogue which makes the broad downs of Wiltshire so attractive to the lover of birds, the Curlew, Thick-knee, Dotterel and Golden Plover still being found amongst us, while both the Great and Lesser