THE COMMON BUNTING. 
241 
Wilson, Audubon, and Dr. Richardson give most interesting 
accounts of the snow-bunting from personal observation in North 
America. The last author had the gratification of meeting with the 
bird in its breeding-haunt on that continent. Mr. Macgillivray 
treats fully of it in Scotland, and Mr. Selby favours us with the 
result of his observations on the species in the north of England. 
When ascending, in the month of July, above the perpetual snow- 
line of the Alps of Switzerland, Mt. St. Gothard, Grimsel, Col de Tour, 
&c., and to the height of 13,000 feet, the snow-finch {Fringilla nivalis ), 
a bird which in size, marking, and note, reminded me at a little dis- 
tance of the snow-bunting, was almost ever-present. Its feeble voice, 
mingled occasionally with that of the alpine accentor {Accentor alpinus), 
seemed in one sense, strangely out of unison with the stern grandeur of 
the scenery, where rarely any other sound broke upon the ear, than 
the rent of the glacier or the distant fall of the avalanche. 
The Lapland Bunting {Plectrophan.es Lapponica ), which has in a 
very few instances been met with in England, has not yet been obtained 
in Scotland (Jard., Macg.) or Ireland. 
THE COMMON BUNTING. 
Corn-Bunting. Briar-Bunting. 
Ember iza miliaria, Linn. 
Is found throughout the island, and is permanently resi- 
dent. 
The Common Bunting, as it is called, is not by any means so 
generally dispersed in Ireland, as the yellow bunting, and accord- 
ingly, is not so common * or well known as that species, which 
is one of the first birds that we become familiar with in child- 
hood. The names of briar and corn bunting applied to the bird 
in the north, of Ireland are more correctly expressive ; in the south, 
it is locally called corn-bird.f A few of these buntings were 
* Since tlie preceding was written, it has been observed that Sir Wm. Jardine 
comments in a similar manner on the name, as applied to the bird in the south of 
Scotland. — Brit. Birds, vol. ii, p. 306. 
t Mr. Poole. 
R 
VOL. I. 
