20 BIRDS OF CHESHIRE. 
These contained much valuable information about some 
of the rarer species which have occurred from time to 
time. A paper on the ‘Heronries of Lancashire and 
Cheshire, from the same able pen, appeared in the 
Manchester Guardian in 1881. 
The late Dr. J. D. Sainter, in his Scientific Rambles 
round Macclesfield (1878), gives a list of the birds 
reputed to have occurred in the neighbourhood of 
that town. In the majority of cases he merely 
indicates the comparative rarity of the different 
species. He gives no particulars of the precise 
locality in which some of his rarer species have 
occurred, and it is therefore uncertain whether they 
should be credited to Cheshire, Derbyshire, or Stafford- 
shire. To show how unreliable the list is, it is per- 
haps sufficient to mention that the Dipper, Magpie, 
and Ring Ousel are marked as ‘rare’; the Curlew 
and Common Sandpiper as ‘very rare’; and the 
Great Crested Grebe as ‘very, very rare. The Golden 
Plover is said to be ‘very, very, very rare, and not 
to nest in the district; and the astounding statement 
is made that the Grey Lag Goose used to breed 
regularly upon Danes Moss before the railway crossing 
it was constructed. 
The fourth number of the Proceedings of the Chester 
Society of Natural Science and Literature, published in 
1894, was, to ornithologists, an exceedingly interesting 
volume. It contained an exhaustive paper on the 
‘Heron and Heronries of Cheshire and North Wales,’ 
by Mr. R. Newstead, and the ‘Birds of West Cheshire, 
Denbighshire, and Flintshire,” by Dr. W. H. Dobie. 
This, the latest and most important account of the 
birds of Cheshire, deals with the whole of the county 
west of a line running due south from Warrington, and 
