214 Mr. A. Newton on the Irruption of 



cies for liis magnificent work, now publishing {' The Birds of 

 Great Britain '), comparatively few of the facts of the irruption 

 of 1863, which I have here collated, had been published. It 

 might, therefore, have been fairly open for him (though such 

 was never my own opinion) to state of Syrrhaptes that it " has 

 arrived in numbers at a time, and for several years in succession. 

 Since its first appearance in 1859, it has been steadily arriving, 

 either in pairs, little companies of from eight to ten in number, 

 or in packs of from fifty to a hundred " ('Birds of Great Bri- 

 tain,' pt. iv.). Now, as I have said above, all the assertions I 

 have seen with respect to its occurrence in England, or even in 

 Europe, between 1859 and 1863, have their origin in careless 

 mistakes ; and the summary I have attempted in the preceding 

 paragraph, to my mind, proves that the irruption of 1863 was, if 

 one may so say, one single act. To suppose that the several 

 hundreds of Syrrhaptes which last year occurred in Central or 

 Western Europe came flocking in intermittently and by dribblets 

 necessitates the belief (as I before pointed out in controverting 

 Herr Gatke's views) that the later comers knew in some myste- 

 rious manner the route their predecessors had taken ; and this 

 presumption, I am fully satisfied, is not warranted by any of the 

 details as now unfolded to us, but, on the other hand, is mani- 

 festly opposed to what seems to me the simplest idea of the 

 whole case, namely, to regard the movement as the passage of a 

 single large band, such as one of those, a thousand or more in 

 number, which were seen by Eadde in Dauria, and described by 

 him in the extract I quoted from his work *. 



I rather doubt if the main body ever reached England. Nearly 

 one hundred is the largest flock recorded as having been ob- 



* The curious circumstance of the absence of these birds from Heligo- 

 land for at least a fortnight in the earlier part of June, which partly helped 

 to mislead my worthy correspondent, I think rather points to the con- 

 clusion I have formed. In that little island, under the keen eyes of its 

 watchful ornithologist, they could not possibly have escaped observation. 

 I therefore regard their absence as an established fact, and would explain 

 it on the hypothesis which I have before laid down, that the examples seen 

 subsequently to the 22nd of June had returned thither after vainly attempt- 

 irg to find suitable resting-places further west. The case was similar in 

 Borkum. 



