GEEAT KEED-WARBLER 83 



tained in Mr. AV. Prentis's Birds of Rainliam, 1894, who 

 says : " I have a specimen of the Marsh-Warbler — if the 

 distinction is a broader bill than that of the Reed-Warbler 

 — which was shot in a garden beside a reed-bed at Milton, 

 May, 1866." 



GEEAT REED-WARBLEE. 



Acrocephalus turcloides (Meyer). Vog. Liv-u.- 

 EstJil, p. 116 (1815). 



The earliest and most reliable notices of the occurrence 

 of this species in Kent are as follows : — 



The Rev. F. 0. Morris noticed one killed by the side of 

 a pond near Sittingbourne on May 4, 1853. This speci- 

 men, according to Mr. Chaffey, of Dodington, was 

 obtained by Mr. G. Thomas, of that place. 



One was obtained between Tunbridge and Sevenoaks, 

 and another at Erith ; these are given, but no data are 

 attached to them. 



There is a specimen of the Great Reed-Warbler, 

 labelled Kent, among the Kentish birds bequeathed to 

 the Exeter Museum by the Rev. Bower Scott ; here 

 again no data are attached to it. 



The most interesting account of the discovery of this 

 bird in this county was written by the late Mr. W. 

 Oxenden Hammond in 1881, which is here subjoined : — 



" While snipe-shooting on September 14, 1881, I came 

 across a AVarbler of some kind, which I failed to identify 

 satisfactorily, I had marked a snipe down, as I believed, 

 in a watercress-covered stream which flowed between an 

 alder-bed on one bank and a bank of very high reeds on 

 the other. I had not gone far up the windings of this 



