410 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



Also, on June 14th, 1881, I captured some with just the feathers 

 on wings and shoulders showing." 



Sussex. — Arrives from the Continent about the latter end of 

 March or early in April, and examples have at that period been 

 occasionally taken in an exhausted state within the precincts of 

 the town of Brighton. After a dark, stormy night, in the spring 

 of 1841, a Spotted Crake was found alive in the churchyard of 

 Trinity Chapel, probably attracted — like many other migratory 

 birds which have been captured in the gardens, and even in the 

 areas of the houses — by the long line of gas-lights which extends, 

 almost without interruption, from Brunswick Terrace to Kemp 

 Town. Specimens have been shut near Storrington in the 

 autumn, and several were killed during the month of October, 

 1841, on Henfield Common (Knox, 'Ornithological Rambles in 

 Sussex,' 3rd ed. p. 240). Mr. J. E. Harting writes me word that 

 " Some years ago Henfield Common, in Sussex, was a sure find for 

 Spotted Crake. It was more like an Irish bog than an English the 

 common, and in places quite as treacherous. There were soft 

 places in which you might get in almost overhead." He adds 

 that twenty years ago he used to meet with the Spotted Crake in 

 the marshes lying between Sidlesham and Selsea, where it might 

 sometimes be seen in the broad dykes, swimming like a little 

 Moorhen, nodding its head and flirting its tail. On the 5th Oct. 

 1872, when out snipe-shooting in the parish of Harting, in West 

 Sussex, he flushed and shot one of these birds, which he still has 

 preserved in his collection. It was squatting in a tuft of rushes, 

 and would probably have been passed by undetected, had it not 

 been found by his setter, a red Irish dog which he had broken to 

 retrieve, and which was first-rate for Snipe and Rail. In Mr. W. 

 Borrer's forthcoming work on the Birds of Sussex we shall 

 doubtless find still further particulars of the occurrence of the 

 Spotted Crake in this county. 



Dorset. — " A rare visitant on migration in spring and 



autumn I have notes of one shot near Weymouth, Nov. 5th, 



1852 ; another near Wareham in September, 1868. The late 

 Mr. Thompson sent one alive to the Zoological Society's Gardens, 

 in the Regent's Park, which had been caught in a garden at Radi- 

 pole. His son shot one at Lodmoor, near Weymouth, Sept. 28th, 

 1872 ; and one obtained in the neighbourhood of Blandford is in 

 the collection of the Rev. J. Penny" (Mansel-Pleydell, 'Birds of 



