356 Mr. W. Thompson on the Birds of Ireland. 



logue of the Vertebrate Animals of Ireland,' calls this bird a? 

 " rare visitant/' and to my ornithological friends and myself 

 it is known only as a winter bird of passage resorting at un- 

 certain intervals to this island. Rutty, in his ' Natural History 

 of Dublin' (1772), says, that siskins " come to us in the be- 

 ginning of winter and go away the beginning of spring," im- 

 plying their regular periodical appearance. That they may 

 occasionally even breed in some parts of the county of Wick- 

 lb w, and certain suitable localities in the north, is not im- 

 probable. 



I first saw this species in a wild state in the neighbourhood 

 of Belfast, in the winter of 1826 or 1827, probably the latter, 

 as in that year siskins were met with (and for the first time) 

 by Sir Wm. Jardine in Dumfries-shire. On November 22, 

 1828, my brother shot one near Belfast when feeding on a 

 thistle, and in March 1829, he saw about eight of these birds 

 in our Botanic Garden very busily engaged in feeding among^ 

 the branches of some larch-firs then partially in leaf. Early 

 m the winter of 1835 many — both old and young — taken 

 alive about the town of Antrim, were brought to Belfast for 

 sale, and an example was shown to me which had been killed 

 with a stone out of a flock consisting of from twenty to thirty 

 individuals near Bally mena in the same county. On the 

 Christmas-day of that year, an intelligent observer saw about 

 twenty feeding together on thistles in the county of Down r 

 on the 25 th of February 1836, I met with a couple, one of 

 which was an adult male, on the wooded banks of the river 

 Lagan near Belfast, where the alder predominates, and so late 

 as the 6th of April, saw one which had been then obtained in 

 the last-named county; — during the winter of 1835-36 these 

 birds were unusually plentiful from the north of the island to 

 the neighbourhood of Dublin, where, and in the adjacent 

 eounty of Wicklow, large flocks were seen and numbers killed : 

 examples were likewise procured that season in the county of 

 Cavan. Early in the winter of 1836-37 some of these birds 

 were shot in the counties of Dublin and Wicklow, and again 

 in the winter of 1829-30. A friend who has numbered nearly 

 eighty years and knows the siskin well, recollects its visiting 

 the north of Ireland occasionally throughout his life, and its 

 frequenting in some numbers a large garden attached to a 

 store in the town of Belfast to feed on flax-seed, of which some 

 was always strewn over one of the walks. The same gentle- 

 man saw several of these birds about Ballantrae in Ayrshire, 

 a few days before Christmas 1839. 



Of those before mentioned as brought alive to Belfast, some 

 were purchased by my friend Wm. Sinclaire, Esq., who thus 



