52 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
following, my friend Capt. Dover shot a beautiful male Hider near Bartragh, 
and he thought it probably might have been the companion bird of the one 
I shot, which had disappeared from the river shortly after I had last seen 
them together on the 12th of May. Both specimens are now in the Museum 
of the Royal Dublin Society. The Eider Duck is of very rare occurrence 
on the Irish coast, and especially so on this part of it, these being the first 
of the species that I have met with, although I have been shooting on the 
estuary here every winter for many years past; and Thompson, in his ‘ Birds 
of Ireland,’ mentions only three specimens of this bird as having been 
obtained in Ireland—one, a fine male, obtained near Ballbriggan, on the 
Dublin coast, in May, 1840, and two others shot or the Mayo coast in 
January, 1842.—Rosert Warren (Moyview, Ballina, Co. Mayo). 
OrnitHoLocicat Notes rrom Essex.—A considerable number of the 
Lesser Tern bred last season on the Landguard Fort Common, Felixstow. 
This no doubt is attributable to the protection now afforded them by Act of 
Parliament. Amongst the wading birds and sea-fowl shot during August 
and September last on the Dovrecourt beach, on the flats of the river Stour, 
the salt-marshes at Ramsay, and other places on the east coast, were Knots, 
Sanderlings, Green Sandpipers, Greenshanks, Curlew Sandpipers, Tem- 
minck’s Stints, Red-necked and Gray Phalaropes. A Little Gull also was 
killed on the Dovrecourt beach on August 24th, and a Sandwich Tern on the 
Pye Sand on September 12th. On August 28rd two Kentish Plovers were 
seen, and one of them was shot on the beach at Dovrecourt. A Common 
Skua was obtained just outside Harwich Harbour on September 12th, and 
a female Eider Duck in the River Orwell on the 28th October. During the 
week ending November 4th a great number of Short-eared Owls were killed 
in the neighbourhood of Harwich. Between the 6th and 10th of that month 
seven Purple Sandpipers were shot on the stone breakwater, Harwich; while 
last, though not least, a Spoonbill was shot on the mud-flats of the River 
Stour on October 20th, by a wild-fowler named Porter, who unfortunately 
consigned the bird to the spit.—F’. Kerry (The Bank, Harwich). 
Rare Birps 1x Witrs and Dorset.—On the 22nd October last a 
Dotterell was observed on the downs in this parish by a parishioner whose 
accuracy I can vouch for: he whistled to it as it flew past him, and it 
settled some distance off in the same track he was pursuing, when he rose 
it asecond time. The Dotterel is annually getting rarer, I am sorry to 
say, on our Wiltshire Downs; but they are still occasionally seen on the 
Plain near Salisbury, both in spring and autumn, though not so regularly 
or in such numbers of late years as formerly. But I am glad to be able to 
assert that they still form one of that group of comparative rarities in the 
ornithological catalogue which makes the broad downs of Wiltshire so 
attractive to the lover of birds, the Curlew, Thick-knee, Dotterel and Golden 
Plover still being found amongst us, while both the Great and Lesser 
