258 THE BIRDS OF DEVOX. 



Order PTEROCLETES. 



Family PTEROCLID^. 

 Pallas's Sand-G-rouse. Syrrhaptes paradoxus (V-^W.), 



An accidental visitor, of veiy rare occurrence. Like the rest of England, 

 Devonshire was visited by flocks during the great irruptions of this 

 species in 1803 and 1888. 



Although there are tAvo species of Sand-Grouse (Pterocles) which are not 

 uncommon in Portugal, Spain, and X. Africa, this countrv has never been 

 visited b}- stragglers of either, though it would be nothing extraordinary if 

 some had done so, considering how many birds have wandered to our 

 Devonshire coasts from those parts of the world ; it has been reserved for 

 a very singular species, a native of the vast sandy steppes of Central Asia, 

 to introduce the family to Eritish ornithologists. The irruption of Pallas's 

 Sand-Grouse into Western Euro))e in 18G3, and again, a quarter of a 

 century later, in 1888, may justly be regarded as the most sensational 

 ornithological occurrence of modern times. Professor Xewton drew up 

 in 'The Ibis' for 1864 a full and particular account of the visitation of 

 these birds to the United Kingdom in the first irruption, accompanied by 

 a map, on which all the localities where they were observed and reported 

 are set down. We find these to be very numerous along tlie whole ex- 

 tent of the South-east and East Coast of England, beginning at East- 

 bourne and extending north to Per wick-on-T weed ; there are a few 

 marked on the East Coast of Scotland, but very few indeed anywhere on 

 the Western shores of the kingdom, and inland the appearances of the 

 birds were chiefly limited to the Eastern and Eastern Central Counties. In 

 the map there is not a single occurrence marked for either Somerset or 

 Dorset ; in the whole of Devonshire there are only two — Slapton Sands in 

 the south, and Heanton, near Earnsta})le, in tlie north of the county. 

 Two specimens only were recorded from Cornwall — a female shot at the 

 Land's End, and a male, picked up dead at St. Agnes, on the Scilly Isles. 

 The birds were first noticed in England on 21st May (in Northumberland), 

 and we believe the female shot at Heanton, in North Devon, on 11th 

 December, was the last reported for the year. Although Professor Newton 

 calculated that as many as 700 were recorded in the United Kingdom, he 

 did not believe that the main body crossed the North Sea, being brought 

 up by the shores of Holland and Denmark, and passing the summer on the 

 sand dunes of those countries. The year 1888 witnessed as great, if not 

 a greater, arrival of Sand-Grouse in this kingdom, the birds again sweeping 

 gradually across Central Europe from their Asiatic habitat, and trending 

 constantly in a N.W. direction until numbers of them were dispei'sed over 

 the British Islands, and on this occasion they nested and reared their 

 young in several places on the Eastern Coast of Scotland. As in 18(53, 



