Tue Zootocist—Manrcn, 1876. 4835 
the first to acknowledge they were wrong.—John Hancock; 4, St. Mary’s 
Terrace, Newcastle-on-Tyne, February 15, 1876. 
The Calandra Lark a British Bird.—The Calandra lark (Melanocorypha 
Calandra (Linn.) is said to have occurred once at Plymouth and once at 
Exeter. With regard to the latter specimen I have my doubts about it ; 
nor is the former entirely without suspicion, though the specimen which is 
in my collection has not the appearance of having been a foreign skin. 
When I purchased it I obtained, through Mr. Gatcombe’s intervention, the 
following certificate :—“I certify that this Calandra lark was killed by 
St. John’s Lake, and I had it in the flesh and mounted it myself.— 
Abraham Pincombe.” It is said to have been killed by a man named 
Kendall, now dead. It agrees very well with specimens obtained by me in 
Spain and Algeria.—J. H. Gurney, jun. 
Whitewinged Crossbill near London, — When you have perused the 
enclosed note, I think you will agree with me that we have had without 
doubt a visit from a specimen of that rare bird, the whitewinged crossbill, 
in the vicinity of London.—Robert Mitford ; February 9, 1876. 
[I subjoin the letter obligingly forwarded by Mr. Mitford, and written by 
his son :— 
“‘ Bast Molesey, February 7, 1876. 
« My dear Father,—The bird in question was by itself when I saw it— 
once, and then only for a second or two. It was very shy. Ross saw it two 
or three times, but he has not seen it lately: it has always been by itself,— 
no others of the same or any sort of crossbill were with it,—although during 
the time it was about Lady C.’s place there were a good many of the common 
crossbill there. Just at that time, a fortnight or three weeks ago, I was up 
there a good deal, and saw several crossbills every day I was there. Ross 
knows all the birds he saw there just as well as I do, and he told me before 
I saw the bird in question that he had seen a beautiful crossbill with white 
bars on its wings (these were his own words). I immediately thought of 
the whitewinged crossbill. * * * Although I only saw the bird for an 
instant, yet I feel perfectly convinced it was a crossbill, because it had a 
peculiar flight ; the black and white bars on the wings were very conspicuous, 
and such as I had never seen before in any bird.” 
I believe I had the pleasure of first recording the occurrence of a second 
species of whitewinged crossbill in England, in the ‘ Zoologist’ for November, 
1848, and of correctly applying the specific name and synonyms as now 
adopted, but my late friend Henry Doubleday, as there stated, deserves all 
the credit of detecting that the species generally known by that name was 
not identical with the whitewinged crossbill of the Continent. In the third 
edition of his ‘ History of British Birds’ (dated 1856), Mr. Yarrell confirms 
this decision of Mr. Doubleday’s, and points out that De Selys-Longchamps, 
in his ‘Fauna of Belgium,’ had previously differentiated the two birds. 
