The Zoologist— July, 1870. 2195 



residents. The Land's End district can boast of very few of our 

 summer migrants as permanent summer visitors : we are without the 

 song of the nightingale, garden fauvette, lesser whitethroat, reed wren, 

 pied flycatcher, tree pipit, or wood wren. All these species, however, 

 have been noted at Scilly, and some few occasionally near Penzance, 

 but almost always during the autumnal raigratorial season. One cause 

 for their passing us by may be the absence of natural woods and 

 arboreal cover, as some of the above are found in other parts of the 

 county throughout the summer ; but the occurrences of such rare and 

 interesting species as the spotted eagle, redbreasted flycatcher and the 

 lesser gray shrike are sufficient encouragements to watch the Natural 

 History of the far west. The same remark also applies to our water 

 birds and waders. A large number of this class have occurred in 

 Cornwall, but generally at seasons when the migratory impulses have 

 set them moving for their long flights, the western part of Cornwall 

 being their final point for departure. The larger portion of the exten- 

 sive family of ducks retire northward to rear their young, returning to 

 us in the autumn, and in increased numbers when driven by severe 

 frosts to seek their food where marshes and water are less icebound; 

 the grebes, divers and a very large list of our sea birds doing the 

 same, as well as the snipes, woodcocks, sandpipers, stints, godvvits and 

 other wading birds. We are visited with a large number of these 

 birds in their southern migratorial movements in the autumn — some 

 as a resting-place for a further flight, and others for a permanent 

 residence during the winter months, until the spring months invite 

 their return northward. It has been remarked that the starlings, which 

 formerly only visited the West of England in the autumn and winter 

 months, have gradually extended their summer residence westward of 

 late years, so that we find, more or less, numbers annually rearing 

 their young where hitherto they were entire strangers. The stone 

 plover, although a summer visitor in other parts of England, and 

 whose well-known and remarkable whistle is heard in Hampshire, 

 Wiltshire and other southern counties, is never seen in the Lizard and 

 Land's End districts, except in winter; and the only way to account 

 for this deviation is to presume that a portion of the migratory party 

 in their southern flight in the autumn hold a northern limit, just 

 reaching the Land's End and the Lizard lands (the most southern in 

 the British isles) ; the corresponding northern migration in the spring 

 just taking the whole number above the southern latitudes of the 

 extreme western counties. The same remark applies to one of our 



