Notes. 261 



it would be not very difficult to find a nest among the curiosities 

 of the sea. So the little blue bird came to suffer " a sea-change, 

 into something rich and strange," through the careless fancy of 

 the imaginative Greek. 



NOTE D. Redpolls in the Alps. (p. 195.) 



On page 49 of the first edition of this book there was a 

 paragraph which described the shooting by Anderegg of a 

 Lesser Redpoll (Linota rufescens} on the Engstlen Alp. The 

 date was June 30 (1884), and I had little doubt that the bird 

 (which was a female) was one of a pair which had been breed- 

 ing there. And this idea was confirmed by the discovery of a 

 nest in the same place by Anderegg in May of the present 

 year (1886), which Mr. Scott Wilson, who was with him at the 

 time, considered to belong to the Lesser Redpoll. 



The form, however, of the Redpoll which is usually found 

 in the Alps is that which is usually called ' Mealy ' (Linota 

 linaria) ; this has been reported by Mr. Seebohm as pretty 

 frequent in the Engadine, and by Prof. Newton, on the authority 

 of Colonel Ward, as having been abundant in Canton Vaud in 

 the winter of 1874-5. All the Redpolls I saw last September 

 were, to judge from size and colouring, of this form : so also 

 were all that I have seen in Swiss museums marked as having 

 been shot in the Alps. Believing therefore, on these grounds, 

 and in deference to the arguments of the Rev. H. A. Mac- 

 pherson, that both Mr. Scott Wilson and myself had made a 

 mistake, I struck out the paragraph in question from my second 

 edition. 



Since doing so, however, I have paid a visit to Cambridge, 

 where Prof. Newton pointed out to me a passage in Prof. 

 Giglioli's recently published catalogue of Italian birds bearing 



