NOTES FROM WEST SUSSEX. A7 
few “highly white-mottled Grouse,” which the gamekeeper had 
also observed for several years, and Mr. Dover himself has seen 
and shot upon Skiddaw some Grouse, “ with plumage much mixed 
with white, and with their legs deeply feathered, white to the toes, 
so as to give them a whitish mottled appearance when seen upon 
the open at a little distance.” Again, in a more recent letter, he 
tells me that a few years ago a party, when shooting Grouse upon 
Shap Fells, in Westmoreland, met with two or three birds which 
were so white that two Scotch gamekeepers who were present 
called them Ptarmigan; and these birds both Mr. Dover and his 
informant believe were white-mottled Grouse. So far, Mr. Dover 
has not succeeded in finding any tradition of the former existence 
of the Ptarmigan in the Lake District. 
Hence, I think, we may assume that Pennant and Heysham 
(if the latter did not quote Pennant) may have derived their 
knowledge from the same informant, who, in the careless way in 
which Natural History was then studied, is very likely to have 
merely reported the existence, in small numbers, of a white or 
white-mottled Grouse upon the mountains near Keswick; and 
the Ptarmigan having, at that time, only lately been included in 
the British fauna, any “‘ white” or “ white-mottled” Grouse would 
be identified with it. 
I conclude, accordingly, that it was some white or whitish 
variety of the Red Grouse, and not the Ptarmigan, which used, 
in the time of Pennant, to frequent, as it does still, the lofty hills 
near Keswick. 
ORNITHOLOGICAL NOTES FROM WEST SUSSEX. © 
By WIituiaM JEFFERY. 
Tuer index in the closing number of ‘ The Zoologist’ for 1880 
reminds me that I have not been a contributor to its pages 
during the year. I find that my last note recorded to the end 
of 1878 only. 
There has not been much to chronicle throughout the years 
1879 and 1880. ‘T'wo severe winters, an unusually wet and cold 
summer (1879), have afforded little material for comment in an 
ornithological point of view, but I append a few notes from my 
diary. 
