Chough. 217 



with his usual wonderful knowledge of nature, shows that he did 

 not share in that mistake, for in describing the height of the 

 cliff at Dover he says : 



'The Crows and Choughs that wing the midway air 

 Show scarce as gross as beetles.' 



Wiltshire, too, is one of the few inland counties which has had its 

 stragglers of this species. Yarrell, quoting from the Field 

 Naturalist's Magazine for August, 1832, recounts how a Red- 

 legged Crow was killed on the Wiltshire Downs, near the Bath 

 Road between Marlborough and Calne, by a man employed in 

 keeping birds from corn : this must have been very near, if not 

 in, my own parish of Yatesbury. In addition to this, Blyth, the 

 editor of ' White's Selborne,' records the capture of another of 

 this species on Salisbury Plain. Mr. King, of Warminster, 

 recollects that many years ago one of this species was killed by 

 a shepherd lad at Battlesbury Camp, on the edge of Salisbury 

 Plain, about a mile and a half from Warminster, but that 

 specimen was, unfortunately, not preserved. The Rev. E. Duke 

 has one which was killed at Lake, and is in a small collection 

 there made by his father as illustrative of the Fauna of Lake, and 

 I have one more instance of its occurrence in the county, for the 

 Rev. F. Dyson killed one many years since on the downs at 

 Tidworth, where two had been seen hovering about for many 

 days previous. This I fear is likely to be the last specimen of 

 this truly graceful bird wandering to our county, for it is now 

 become very rare even in those localities on the sea-coast where 

 it was once most numerous, and will probably soon be classed in 

 that sad catalogue of species which, once abundant, are now ex- 

 terminated by the ruthless rage for slaughter so prevalent with 

 all classes, in which the noble Bustard already figures, and will 

 soon be joined by the Kite and the Bittern, and many another 

 interesting bird with which the last generation was familiar. 



Of the meaning of Fregilus I know nothing, but by most 

 modern ornithologists Pyrrhocorax is the generic name in use : 

 this is defined by the B.O.U. Committee to be 'a Crow with 

 red beak,' from ffyg*oV, ' the colour of fire ' (*fy), and *o>ag, ' a 



