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with on several occasions in this country, and, owing to its similarity to the Dunlin, may have 

 been oftener killed and not recorded, having been mistaken for that species. Mr. J. E. Harting, 

 in his ' Handbook of British Birds,' records fourteen specimens as having been obtained in Great. 

 Britain, viz. : — one at Stoke Heath, Shropshire ; one in Ireland, now in the Belfast Museum ; a 

 pair at Hayle, Cornwall, 13th of October, 1846; one, Scilly, October 1854; one, Kingsbury, 

 Middlesex, 1856 ; one, Bexhill, Sussex, 8th of October, 1857 ; two, Scilly, October 1870 ; four, 

 Instowe, North Devon, November 1870 ; and one, Eastbourne, Sussex, 12th of November, 1870. 



Respecting the four Devonshire birds to which Mr. Harting refers, Mr. Cecil Smith writes 

 to me as follows: — "One of these stragglers from America was shot near Barnstaple on the 6th 

 of November 1870, and left about on the counter of Mr. Howe's shop (the Barnstaple bird-stuffer 

 and gunmaker), and would have been thrown away ; but luckily Mr. Home of that place saw it, 

 and told the gunmaker he had better send it to me. Accordingly that and one shot a few days 

 later were sent to me in the flesh. Another, also shot about the same time, was sent to 

 Mr. Mathew, our vicar. These three birds are now in our collections. A fourth was also shot on 

 the Barnstaple river, but was thrown away, as not worth the trouble of stuffing. Mr. Mathew's 

 bird and my two were in change of plumage, many of the rufous summer feathers still being 

 intermixed with the dull grey ones of the winter plumage. In this state it much resembles a 

 Purre shot about the same time of year, the white rump of course distinguishing it ; the other 

 most conspicuous distinctions at this time of year appear to me the entire absence of the black 

 spots on the breast (which, as the remains of the summer plumage of the Purre, always appear at 

 this time of year) and a slightly more distinct white eye-streak. These occurrences were duly 

 recorded by me in the 'Zoologist' for 1870, as 'Schinz's' Sandpiper, under which name this bird 

 is figured in former editions of Yarrell ; his plate, however, in the third edition is undoubtedly 

 ' Bonaparte's Sandpiper,' and not the bird now generally known as ' Schinz's.' " 



It does not appear to have been recorded from any other part of Europe, as the bird referred 

 to by continental authors under the name of Tringa schinzii, Brehm, which by some authors has 

 been confused with the present species, is nothing but a small race of the Common Dunlin. 

 This mistake, as Dr. Elliott Coues points out to me, appears to have originated with Bonaparte in 

 1828, this being the earliest notice of the American Tringa schinzii. In a letter lately received 

 from Dr. Coues, in which he states that this Sandpiper is " abundant in North America," he 

 writes as follows : — " I have studied this little bird in various remote sections of this country- 

 In Kansas I found it migrating northward in May, and at that time assuming the richer summer 

 livery in which it is rarely seen hi the United States. It was in small flocks, rambling over the 

 banks and bars of the Republican Fork of the Kansas river, and was then, as I have always 

 found it, very gentle and unsuspecting. None of our little Sandpipers, however gregarious and 

 sociable, pack closer together than this one. I fired into a flock of thirteen once, and picked up 

 eleven of them. This occurrence of the species in the interior shows a line of migration different 

 from that which the majority pursue, and which lies along the Atlantic coast; so also does 

 Richardson's indication of its presence on the Saskatchewan. On the shores of North Carolina 

 I found the birds abundant during the migrations, both vernal and autumnal, mixing indiscrimi- 

 nately with Dunlins, Stints, and the Ereunetes — sometimes on the sandy beach itself, but oftener 

 in the muddy flats just back of the sand dunes. We have numerous quotations of its appearance 



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