YELLOW-BROWED WILLOW-WREN. 443 



and, frequently, shot. A few examples were obtained in other parts of 

 Europe ; and British oologists were so anxious to obtain eggs of this in- 

 teresting British bird that Mr. Brooks made an expedition to Cashmere on 

 purpose to discover them, returning home in triumph with abundance of 

 spoil. The curious reader may find a most interesting account of Brooks's 

 discoveries in Cashmere in ' The Ibis ' for 1872, p. 24, most of which is 

 copied in Dresser's ' Birds of Europe/ and extracts from which are also 

 given by Xewton in his edition of Yarrell's ' British Birds/ It was a 

 great disappointment to Brooks, six years later, to be obliged to confess 

 that the eggs he obtained were not those of the British species. By the 

 discovery that the Cashmere bird was a new and undescribed species, his 

 well-deserved success was deprived of half its brilliancy. The egg of the 

 Yellow-browed Warbler again became a desideratum in every collection 

 of British birds' eggs ; and it was not until the summer of 1877 that an 

 authentic egg of this species was obtained, when I had the good fortune 

 to find a single nest not very far east of Brooks's locality, but more than 

 two thousand miles further north. 



Besides the information which I was able to record from personal obser- 

 vation in the valley of the Yenesay, I am fortunate in being able to add a 

 most interesting account of the habits of this bird in Heligoland from the 

 able pen of my friend Mr. Gaetke, whose long-promised work on the 

 ornithology of Heligoland is so eagerly looked for by every lover of birds. 



After mentioning the six or seven times that this bird has been procured 

 in various parts of the continent and England, Gaetke goes on to say : 



" How does Heligoland compare with the rest of Europe with its half- 

 dozen isolated instances of the appearance of this interesting little bird ? 

 Since I first made its acquaintance in 1846, and called the attention of 

 our island sportsmen to its peculiarities, this little Warbler has been seen 

 at least sixty times. Of this there can be no manner of doubt. Some 

 twenty-five or twenty-six examples have been shot and most of them pre- 

 served. In addition to these sixty undoubted occurrences there have been 

 at least twenty cases where boys (my highly-prized blowpipe-shooters) have 

 assured me that they have seen a ' striped flysnapper;' but I have not made 

 a note of it, not liking to record any observation about which there might 

 be some doubt. 



" Of the specimens which I have mounted, four are at present on my 

 table ; two (one of them the first shot on the island, on the 4th of October 

 1846) I presented to the late Colonel von Zittwitz, whose fine collection 

 is now in the possession of the Leyden University ; and two others, which 

 belonged to my late friend Blasius, are now in the Brunswick Museum. 

 The Coburg^^Iuseum has one example; and another is in the possession of 

 the Hon. Percy Fielding in London. I sent Alfred Xewton one finely 

 marked bird and a second somewhat injured with the shot. I gave a 



