12 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



the birds, with the nest and eggs, " procured in the vicinity 

 of Epping Forest by Henry Doubleday, Esq.," who considered 

 that it was owing to their extreme shyness that we had been 

 hitherto kept in ignorance of their habits. At that time 

 the occurrence of the Hawfinch in other parts of England, 

 so far as information then went, was confined to stra"o;lin<j 



o o o 



parties or individuals ; but Sir William Jardine thought that 

 the attention of ornithologists might perhaps discover other 

 breeding stations besides Epping and Windsor and the vicinity 

 of Wolverhampton, in all of which localities records of its 

 nidification had already been obtained. In the north, he says 

 that it had been killed or seen in the counties of Durham and 

 Cumberland, as well as across the border in Dumfriesshire. 



Gray, in his " Birds of the West of Scotland," published 

 in 1871, was unable to record the Hawfinch as a West of 

 Scotland species, though specimens had by that time been 

 obtained in nearly all the eastern counties as far north as 

 Aberdeenshire, Banffshire (where Mr. Edward informed Mr. 

 More that he believed a pair had once bred), and Caithness. 

 Mr. Howard Saunders, however, has no doubt that it has 

 been steadily increasing during the last fifty years, and says 

 that, though still local in distribution, its nest has been 

 obtained in every county in England, excepting Cornwall, 

 and even as far north as the Lake District, though there the 

 bird becomes rare. In Russia, the Hawfinch has been found 

 nesting as far north as the vicinity of St. Petersburg. 



Macgillivray, in his account of the Hawfinch, has an 

 interesting note on the extension of range of this and other 

 birds, which, recorded first as winter visitants, have 

 subsequently been found to be breeding and resident species 

 in the same district. He says : " It is quite possible that, 

 although the Hawfinches are now resident in several parts 

 of England, they may, at a former period, have been merely 

 winter visitants. In Scotland this would appear to have 

 been the case with the Missel -Thrush, which appeared 

 occasionally in flocks during the winter in districts where it 

 was not seen in summer. Twenty years ago it was scarcely 

 ever observed in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh at the 

 latter season, insomuch that I was scarcely disposed to believe 

 the evidence of my eyes when I first saw a pair of them at 



