THE ZOOLOGIST. 



ON THE OCCURRENCE OF PALLAS'S WILLOW 

 WARBLER IN NORFOLK. 



By Thomas Southwell. 



In the December number of * The Zoologist ' I had the 

 pleasure briefly to record the occurrence of a specimen of the 

 above rare Warbler, Phylloscopus proregulus (Pall.), at Cley-next- 

 the-Sea, Norfolk, on Oct. 3 1st last. Mr. Ramm, the person who 

 shot the bird, tells me that he found it amongst the long grass 

 on the bank or sea-wall, not far from the sea, at Cley, a locality 

 which has produced many rare migrants, and at first took it for a 

 Goldcrest, but on approaching to within two or three yards, the 

 bird being very tame, he thought he recognized a Yellow-browed 

 Warbler, a species he had seen before, and therefore secured it. 

 Mr. Pashley, of Cley, to whom the bird was sent for preservation, 

 forwarded it to me for determination, as he had some doubt 

 whether it was really a Yellow-browed Warbler; and, with the 

 assistance of Mr. Gurney, we were able to identify it as Pallas's 

 Willow Warbler, Phylloscopus proregulus. This Mr. Dresser was 

 good enough to confirm ; he also exhibited the specimen, which 

 proved on dissection to be a female, probably adult, at the meeting 

 of the Zoological Society on Dec. 1st, 1896. 



Considerable confusion exists in the writings of the ornitho- 

 logists of the first half of the present century with regard to two 

 nearly allied species of this difficult group. I should therefore 

 be glad if you will allow me to make a few remarks, which I hope 

 may assist in placing in a clearer light the history of the claims 

 of this, and the Yellow-browed Warbler, to be regarded as acci- 

 dental migrants to the eastern shore of Great Britain. 



Phylloscopus proregulus seems to have been first described by 

 Pallas in the ' Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica,' which appeared in 1811, 

 but was probably little known (if at all) to British ornithologists 

 till the publication of Gould's ' Birds of Europe ' in 1837 (vol. ii. 

 p. 149), where Mr. Gould describes a bird, then new to him, and as 

 he also believed new to science, which he named Eegulus modestus, 



