94 CHARADMIDiE. 



month of November). I saw the specimen in the house of Mr. 

 Reid, at Ballygowan Bridge, in the spring of that year, and was 

 told that two others were in company with it when killed. Mr. 

 R. Davis, jun. of Clonmel, has informed me that he obtained a 

 dotterel, which was shot on the summit of the high mountain, 

 Sliev-na-mon, about the 24th of June, 1835, in company with 

 golden plover. That gentleman himself ascended the mountain 

 on the 18th of August, and saw at some little distance two birds 

 which he believed to be dotterels : he imagined that the species 

 might be breeding there. He subsequently favoured me with the 

 examination of the skin of one shot in another locality — on the 

 mountains in the " Liberties of Clonmel " on the 24th of Au- 

 gust, 1840 : it was in a state of moult, and had lost many 

 feathers; but sufficient remained to prove its being a male, and at 

 least one year old. On the 18th of August, 1841, two of these 

 birds, believed to be an old and a young one, were seen by my 

 correspondent hanging in a cook's shop in Clonmel. Although 

 positive information could not be obtained respecting them, he had 

 little doubt of their having beei* shot near the town. The pre- 

 ceding information leads to the belief that the dotterel may, in very 

 limited numbers, annually migrate to the elevated mountains of 

 the county of Tipperary to breed. If so, they are by far its 

 most southern breeding haunts in the British islands. 



A gentleman, to whom the species is well known, has assured 

 me that he saw four dotterels (of which he shot one) about the 

 middle of August, 1841, in a field bordering Belfast bay, at Gar- 

 nerville. About the end of September 1844, one was obtained 

 in a fallow field a few miles to the west of Cork.* Early in 

 April 1848 a flock of about twenty dotterels appeared in a 

 ploughed field in the Ards near Ballywalter (Down). Stones 

 were several times thrown at them, which they regarded no more 

 than by taking wing to fly to a very short distance. As they 

 proved so tame, and were remarked by Mr. James Rankin, who 

 was present, to be of a species unknown in the district, he went 



* Dr. Harvey in Fauna of Cork, Preface, p. iv. 



