Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/211

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(Ditton Hall, Cambridge).

Varieties of the Dunlin.—Seventeen or eighteen years ago the late Mr. Blackett Greenwell, of Alston, gave me the skin of a very small Dunlin, and told me that it was one of the Crossfell race, which I am sufficiently familiar with in life, though I never shot a breeding Dunlin on the fells. I have seen many hundreds of Dunlins on the Solway Firth in the breeding season, and with a good glass examined them at their nests as closely as if I had held them in my hand, but I never met with a bright-coloured Dunlin on the marshes of the Solway Firth. The Solway Firth birds lack the broad dorsal margins of chesnut which exist in the typical "fell" Dunlin, and which are likewise characteristic of the large Dunlin, which Dr. R.B. Sharpe has separated as Pelidna americana (Cat. Birds, vol. xxiv. p. 608). I think that the breeding Dunlins of the Solway Firth would average rather larger than the fell Dunlin. They have longer bills than my Crossfell bird, which is the typical bright-coloured "drain Dunlin" of some east-coast ornithologists. The Dunlins which swarm on the Solway Firth in the latter part of August and September are principally birds of the larger British race, possessed of far shorter bills than the typical American Dunlin, but easily distinguished from our small breeding Dunlins. I can match the Dunlin, which Mr. Greenwell considered to be the typical fell-side Dunlin, with two east-coast birds—one, a male obtained at Great Yarmouth on May 12th, 1875; and the other, a female procured at Greatham on May 28th, 1866. These three agree in having very short bills, and in having the feathers of the upper parts broadly fringed with chesnut, a feature which is not characteristic of the marsh-loving Dunlins of the Solway Firth. Though at one time I had occasion to shoot a good many Dunlins,