AND NEIGHBOURHOOD. 303 



startled by a dog. These birds do well and thrive 

 for long periods in a well-kept aviary, but instances 

 of their breeding in captivity appear to be very few 

 and far between. Our Partridge is found more or 

 less abundantly throughout Central and Northern 

 Europe, but is not met with in any of the large 

 islands of the western Mediterranean, and in Spain 

 appears to be confined to the mountain-ranges of the 

 north and north-west ; we have met with it in Aragon 

 and in Santander, generally high up on grassy 

 plateaux in the hills. Varieties of the Partridge are 

 not uncommon, though we personally have met with 

 very few of them : we occasionally, on one particular 

 beat near Lilford, meet with birds in which the horse- 

 shoe on the breast so characteristic of the species is 

 of a deep bronze colour instead of the usual dark 

 chestnut, and now and then with individuals in 

 which this marking is white. We have never been 

 able to verify the accounts given by various authors 

 of the more or less regular migrations of the Grey 

 Partridge in the south of Europe, but have ascer- 

 tained, to our own satisfaction, that it does not exist 

 in many localities in which it has been recorded as 

 abundant, amongst others Sicily, Sardinia, and North 

 Africa. In the western portions of European 

 Turkey, bordering the Adriatic, this species is 

 curiously local, and many ardent sportsmen of our 

 garrisons of the Ionian Islands, before their unhappy 

 cession to Greece, were in the habit of shooting 

 constantly on the mainland of Epirus and Albania 

 without even meeting with what we fondly call the 

 English Partridge, but the bird is, or was, never- 

 theless, fairly abundant in certain localities at no 

 great distance from Corfu, and other of these former 



