YELLOW-BROWED WILLOW-WREN. 443 
and, frequently, shot. A few examples were obtained in other parts of 
Europe ; and British oologists were so anxious to obtain eggs of this in- 
teresting British bird that Mr. Brooks made an expedition to Cashmere on 
purpose to discover them, returning home in triumph with abundance of 
spoil. The curious reader may find a most interesting account of Brooks’s 
discoveries in Cashmere in ‘The Ibis’ for 1872, p. 24, most of which is 
copied in Dresser’s ‘ Birds of Europe,’ and extracts from which are also 
given by Newton in his edition of Yarrell’s ‘ British Birds.’ It was a 
great disappointment to Brooks, six years later, to be obliged to confess 
that the eggs he obtained were not those of the British species. By the 
discovery that the Cashmere bird was a new and undescribed species, his 
well-deserved success was deprived of half its brilliancy. The egg of the 
Yellow-browed Warbler again became a desideratum in every collection 
of British birds’ eggs; and it was not until the summer of 1877 that an 
authentic egg of this species was obtained, when I had the good fortune 
to find a single nest not very far east of Brooks’s locality, but more than 
two thousand miles further north. 
Besides the information which I was able to record from personal obser- 
vation in the valley of the Yenesay, I am fortunate in being able to add a 
most interesting account of the habits of this bird in Heligoland from the 
able pen of my friend Mr. Gaetke, whose long-promised work on the 
ornithology of Heligoland is so eagerly looked for by every lover of birds. 
After mentioning the six or seven times that this bird has been procured 
in various parts of the continent and England, Gaetke goes on to say :— 
“ How does Heligoland compare with the rest of Europe with its half- 
dozen isolated instances of the appearance of this interesting little bird ? 
Since I first made its acquaintance in 1846, and called the attention of 
our island sportsmen to its peculiarities, this little Warbler has been seen 
at least sixty times. Of this there can be no manner of doubt. Some 
twenty-five or twenty-six examples have been shot and most of them pre- 
served. In addition to these sixty undoubted occurrences there have been 
at least twenty cases where boys (my highly-prized blowpipe-shooters) have 
assured me that they have seen a ‘ striped flysnapper;’ but I have not made 
a note of it, not liking to record any observation about which there might 
be some doubt. 
“ Of the specimens which I have mounted, four are at present on my 
table ; two (one of them the first shot on the island, on the 4th of October 
1846) I presented to the late Colonel von Zittwitz, whose fine collection 
is now in the possession of the Leyden University ; and two others, which 
belonged to my late friend Blasius, are now in the Brunswick Museum. 
The Coburg Museum has one example; and another is in the possession of 
the Hon. Percy Fielding in London. I sent Alfred Newton one finely 
marked bird and a second somewhat injured with the shot. I gave a 
