228 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



species has occurred in South Africa. Mr. Barton also showed me 

 some Canaries which he caught in the same locality, and from which 

 he has bred since he returned home, which I am unable to identify 

 with any of the wild species recorded from that region, as they vary so 

 much in colour and markings that no two of them are alike. Some 

 are nearly all yellow, others more or less marked with green, the 

 markings varying considerably, and being most irregular in their dis- 

 tribution. One bird is almost entirely yellow with a green cap, whilst 

 others are much marked with green about the wings and body as well. 

 They look just like the ordinary parti-coloured Canaries you see in 

 cages in England. — E. A. Butler (Plumton House, Bury St. Edmunds, 

 Suffolk). 



[This is a most interesting record for one who, like myself, has 

 collected and observed birds for a period of four years in the Transvaal. 

 During that time I neither saw this bird nor heard the slightest 

 suggestion that it was to be found in a wild condition. It is practically 

 certain that the Goldfinches caught at Heidelberg must have been 

 escaped birds, and it seems as equally correct to say that nothing of 

 the kind was known up to near the end of 1896, when I left the Trans- 

 vaal. A friend who kept imported Goldfinches in his aviary at Pretoria 

 complained that they were difficult to keep alive for any length of time- 

 I have written to the Transvaal for further information on this sub- 

 ject.— Ed.] 



A Vanishing British Bird. — In the April number of this Journal 

 Mr. Robert Warren protests against the continued persecution of the 

 Red-throated Diver at its single Irish breeding-haunt. It is unfortu- 

 nately only too easy to point to other cases of a similar kind. But for 

 the greed of private egg-collectors, who fill their cabinets with clutches 

 of British-taken eggs of our rarer species, the Kite, though in small 

 numbers, and in a limited district, would be safe from all immediate 

 danger of extinction. Instead of this we find it reduced, as far as 

 Wales is concerned, to a miserable remnant of two or three pairs. All 

 who have seen Milvits ictinus upon the wing will agree with Knapp, the 

 Gloucestershire naturalist, when he terms it " the finest native bird 

 that we possess." Yet the present decade will in all probability see 

 its extinction as a British bird. It cannot be too plainly stated that 

 it is not the dealers who have harried the nests systematically for 

 years who are primarily responsible for its fate, but the wealthy 

 collectors who offer in some cases as much as £15 for a clutch of 

 Welsh Kite's eggs. Many of them have never seen the bird in its 

 haunts, and appear to have no interest in it apart from its eggs. In 



