no Wild Birds and their Haunts 



THE BIRDS OF LEICESTERSHIRE. 



I AM indebted to Stephen H. Pilgrim, Esq., of 

 Burbage, for his interesting following notes : — 

 ' ' Mr. Montague Browne, late curator of the 

 Leicester Museum, is the only man so far as I know who 

 has in recent times given a reliable history of the birds 

 of the county, of which he records some 190 species, 

 though many of these are only of single or very rare or 

 accidental occurrences. The history is contained in his 

 book, ' The Vertebrate Animals of Leicestershire and 

 Rutland,' and also in the ' Victoria History of the 

 County of Leicester,' and in several instances he quotes 

 as an authority for including a species the writings of 

 Harley, who wrote in the latter part of the first half of 

 last century. We cannot expect to find many of the 

 birds he mentions here, as he had the large reservoirs 

 in some parts of the county, the district watered by the 

 Soar, etc., Charnwood Forest and Belvoir, with the 

 district bordering Lincolnshire to draw upon. 



1 ' Taking the various families in the order in which 

 they appear in his book, we come first to the sub-family 

 " TurdincB,' which embraces the thrushes, chats, red- 

 starts, redbreasts and nightingale, and of these we have 

 the five common thrushes, the song thrush, blackbird 

 and missel thrush as residents, and the fieldfare and red- 

 wing as winter visitors. The only other one mentioned 

 by Montague Browne as an uncommon visitor is the ring 

 ousel. I have only a record of one which was picked up 

 dead about 22 years ago under the telegraph wires not 

 far from this place, and as it is a moorland bird leaving 

 this country in the winter, we are hardly likely to meet 

 with it except by accident or on migration. The very 

 rare White's thrush, a Continental bird, is a possibility 

 only. The three chats Mr. Browne gives we also have, 

 viz., the wheatear, the stonechat, and the whinchat, but 

 the first only on his passage to and from his breeding 

 quarters and the stonechat is uncommon ; he is a beau- 



