WAXWING. 527 



there is a continuous stream of immigrants is unknown. If 

 there is not the birds would seem generally to escape much 

 notice until thej^ have wandered from the place of their land- 

 fall, and thus it may happen that it is not until they have been 

 for some six or eight weeks in the country and have become 

 pretty widely dispersed that the greatest numbers are observed, 

 and, according to the prevalent custom, shot. The visitation 

 of 1849-50 is the first of those above mentioned concerning 

 which our records are at all complete, and it appears from 

 Mr. Newman's summary of the observations reported in the 

 ' Zoologist ' alone that 586 examples were noticed between 

 November and March — nearly half of which occurred in the 

 second and third weeks of January. The visitation of 1866-67 

 does not seem to have been so great as regards England ; and 

 though the birds extended their wanderings to the south- 

 western counties of England, yet Norfolk furnished incom- 

 parably the largest number of examples. In that county, 

 according to Mr. Stevenson (who has supplied this work with 

 a valuable paper on the immigration), 144 specimens were 

 obtained on this occasion, and a flock of about sixty was in 

 one case seen. In Scotland on the other hand more birds 

 would appear to have been then observed than in 1849-50, 

 and in Aberdeenshire and Moray, according to Mr. Gray, 

 they were seen in flocks of forty or fifty. 



Almost every county in England seems to have been 

 visited by the Waxwing, but its occurrence on the eastern 

 side of this island is far more frequent than on the western. 

 Still it occasionally appears in Ireland, and, when Mr. 

 Watters wrote, he said there were some fifteen or twenty 

 authenticated instances of its occurrence in various parts of 

 that kingdom, most of which appear to have been in the 

 eastern or northern counties. Mr. Gray has not been able to 

 trace it in the Outer Hebrides, but it has been shot in Skye. 

 It has also been obtained in Orkney, Shetland and the Faeroes. 

 On the continent its range is very wide, extending from 

 Norway on the west to the shores of the Sea of Ochotsk on 

 the east — in winter reaching to the south of France and even 

 of Italy, since Dr. Salvadori mentions a specimen procured 



