37 



channel which separates the islands of Hoy and 

 Pomona, Orkneys. The fishermen told me this 

 distance, at the point where I was sailing, was quite 

 four miles across, and the birds must have come at 

 least another mile on the Pomona side from the point 

 where they left the moor.' 



Mr. J. A. Harvie Brown states that in December 

 1879 a pack of grouse was seen flying south over 

 the Moray Firth, making for the Banff coast. Their 

 journey must have been very considerable. It is not 

 easy, in fact, to say how far the grouse is migratory, 

 but that individual birds wander far and wide in 

 autumn and winter there can be no doubt. The Rev. 

 M. A. Mathew records that a solitary red grouse 

 was shot by Mr. C. Edwards on the Mendips, near 

 Wrington, Somerset, in September 1885, and this, he 

 suggests, must have crossed over the Bristol Channel, 

 migrating from Breconshire. Very likely the bird was 

 pursued by a peregrine, and the chase carried it far 

 out of its usual latitude. Similarly, the red grouse 

 included in Mr. Miller Christy's ' Birds of Essex ' had 

 no doubt strayed from Sandringham, or from some 

 other centre of introduction in Eastern England In 

 1879 Mr. W. Stamper observed a pair of grouse in a 

 turnip field on his farm near Oswaldkirk, Yorks, early 

 in February. The birds had strayed at least ten miles 



