364 THE BIRDS OF HELIGOLAND 



numbers that another gunner of the name of Aeuckens was able to 

 shoot twenty of them in one day, while some sixty examples were 

 captured during the course of the autumn migration. From that 

 time onwards the birds appeared every autumn, on every favourable 

 migration day, though perhaps not in such abundance as in the 

 first-mentioned year, during the autumn months of which an 

 exceptionally abundant migration of species from the far East 

 took place. Nevertheless, the numbers of these visitors increased 

 steadily every year from that time. The notes in my journal are 

 as follows : October 1850, several daily ; October 1852, small 

 companies ; November 1863, many ; October, November 1869, 

 hundreds daily ; 20th to 24th October 1870, flocks of from twenty 

 to eighty examples ; on the 28th flocks of hundreds ; October 

 1874, in large quantities. Ten years later they could only be 

 estimated by thousands ; and in the course of recent years the 

 numbers of this handsome lark have increased to such an extent 

 that on some days in the autumn of 1883 all the fields of the Upper 

 Plateau of the island were completely covered with the birds, while in 

 the spring of 1884 there perhaps occurred here more of them than 

 during all the spring migrations of preceding years put together. 



The birds have continued to pass through in the same large 

 numbers annually on all favourable days up to the present year 

 1888. The original native home of the Shore Lark is North 

 America, where it is distributed as a breeding species from high 

 Arctic latitudes down to Texas and the mountain plateaus of 

 Mexico. The more southern individuals do not display the pleasing 

 soft vinous red coloration of the plumage, for the latter has given 

 place to a bright brick red ; their measurements, too, are less than 

 those of the more northern forms. However, they in no way 

 differ from those which at present migrate in hundreds of thou- 

 sands to almost the westernmost parts of Europe. By degrees this 

 species has advanced its nesting stations throughout the whole of 

 northern Asia and Europe as far as Scandinavia, and there is no 

 doubt that it will next establish itself in the north of Scotland ; 

 there might then result the most interesting fact of some of these 

 birds flying across the Atlantic back to their original home as 

 exceptional visitors. The first isolated instances of the occurrence 

 of the Shore Lark in Europe are of very remote date. According 

 to Klein, an example was killed at Danzig as early as the year 

 1667. Frisch, in 1739, gave a representation of an example which 

 had occurred in Brandenburg, and Klein mentions it as having 

 been again observed near Danzig in 1747. At that time the bird 

 was known only as an American species, and the individuals 

 enumerated above were considered to have reached Europe through 



