( 295 ) 

 ROBERT WARREN. 



Few men have during a long lifetime pursued the study of 

 our home birds with more devoted zeal than the veteran 

 Irish ornithologist Robert Warren, who passed away at his 

 CO. Cork residence, Ardnaree, Monkstown, on the 26th of 

 November last, at the age of eighty-six. 



Born at C*ork on the 22nd of March, 1829, he spent the 

 earlier years of his life chiefly at the faniil}^ home. Castle 

 Warren, co. Cork, where the tastes that afterwards distin- 

 guished him quickly developed. Exploring the haunts of 

 sea-birds along the southern coast and on the neighbouring 

 islands, he and his younger brother Edward soon acquired a 

 knowledge that rendered their help valuable to William 

 Thompson, who was then collecting material for his work on 

 the Natural History of Ireland. A conversation with Thomp- 

 son on the subject of Gulls took place during a visit to the 

 Belfast Museum about the year 1846, and led to more special 

 attention being paid by the brothers to these birds. This 

 attention was rewarded early in 1849, when an Iceland Gull 

 shot in Cork Harbour proved their first important prize. 

 From 1847 to the end of 1851, Warren kept up an active 

 correspondence with Thompson, many of whose letters to 

 him are still preserved, and show high appreciation of the 

 value of the younger naturalist's notes. Much of the matter 

 of Warren's communications — up to the close of 1850 — is 

 embodied in the three volumes devoted to birds in Thompson's 

 work. 



Early in 1851 the Warrens left their Cork residence and 

 settled in Sligo, on the shores of Killala Bay ; and it is with 

 his work at the ornithology of that region — previously almost 

 a terra incognita — that Robert Warren's name has come to 

 be most largely associated. In the first spring spent in his 

 new home he had the double good fortune to shoot the first 

 White Wagtail obtained in Ireland, and to find that the shores 

 of Killala Bay were frequented by considerable numbers of 

 the Sandwich Tern — a species not at that time known to 

 have any other Irish breeding-station than Rockabill, off the 

 Dublin coast, where it had been discovered only the year 

 before. In the autumn that followed, another welcome 

 discovery was made, a great migration of Skuas— ^Sfercomr^ws 

 'parasiticus and (as afterwards proved) *S'. pomarinus also — 

 being observed by his brother and himself on a series of 

 wild October days passing over Bartragh Island and the 

 Moy estuary, along a route that was shown by continued 



