3 
birds from St. Gilles, in the Camargue, in the Paris Museum and birds in other continental and English collections, which 
are not a shade darker than or different from the Asiatic birds. The extent of the naked skin crossing the vertex has been 
said to be narrower in Asiatic birds than in European ones. I cannot agree to this distinction, as even in living birds 
the extent of naked skin varies continually, not only according to the season, but even according to the frame of mind 
of the individuals. As a rule the naked skin is more visible, more extended, and more intensely coloured in the breeding 
season than in winter, but even in spring a very great difference in its extent may be noticed between a calm unexcited 
bird and one that is „showing off” or angry. 
Nearly all the Asiatic skins of the Common Crane in the British Museum are from birds killed in India, where 
they resort in winter, so that there is a good chance that the extent of the bare skin (so far as can be judged of naked 
parts in dry skins) should be at a minimum. I am, therefore, convinced that the attempt to distinguish the European 
and Asiatic Cranes as Gns connmmis and Grtts lilfordi has no ground to rest upon and ought to be abandoned. 
The Common Crane has a wide distribution and extends over three continents: Europe, Asia, and the northern 
half of Africa, in most parts of which either as a migrant, a summer- or a winter-visitor, it is a common bird. In Europe 
it extended in former days much more to the west than it does now, and Turner (in his „Avium praecipuarum quarum 
apud Plinium et Aristotelem mentis est, brevis et succincta historia . . . .”. Coloniae 1544) mentions the breeding of it in 
England as quite a usual thing, and states that he had often seen the chicks. The place of nidification was probably, 
as has been suggested by Prof Alfred Newton of Cambridge, the fen-districts of that county, as Crane’s bones have 
occasionally been dug up there, and some specimens are preserved in the Cambridge Museum. In Ireland remains of this 
Crane have been found in the Kitchen-middens of Ballycotton, Co. Cork '), so that it must have been indigenous in that 
country also. The breeding of Cranes in England is, however, quite a thing of the past now, and even so far back as 
1682 the Crane is spoken of by Sir T. Browne (Newton & Cadow Diction, of Birds, p. 109) as a winter visitor only in 
the open parts of Norfolk. No trustworthy account of its breeding in the British Islands has been given ever since, and it 
must now be considered there as a rare straggler from Sweden or Western Germany. 
In Holland the Crane may have bred in former days, but no account of its having done so is given anywhere , 
so far as I know. At the present time it is an irregular visitor, during migration, generally passing over, and very seldom 
alighting in the marshy heathery districts of North Brabant. 
More to the east of Europe the Crane breeds in suitable localities, that is in swampy plains interspersed with 
thin woods and bushes. It is found in Scandinavia, and more to the south, from the 10 th. meridian eastwards, in some 
parts of Hanover, in Mecklenburg, in the neighbourhood of Cresse near Boitzenburg on the Elbe (from which locality 
there are young chicks, taken on the 3rd. June 1890, in the Hamburg Museum), in Brandenburg, around the Baltic, in 
Silesia, along the Danube, and in Russia, and eastwards locally all over the northern half of Asia. Taczanowski records 
its breeding regularly in the Darusun country in Transbaikalia. Finsch, during the Bremen expedition to Western Siberia, 
saw it frequently in July along the river Ob and on lake Ala-kul. Seebohm found it in the Valley of the Yenesay, but 
not northwards of 60“ N. L. Severtzoff records it as breeding in the cultivated districts and woods of Turkestan. Demi- 
doff found it breeding in Podolia, Volhynia, and Bessarabia. Stejneger records the probability of its having occurred in 
Behring Island, and Steller says it has been observed iri Kamtschatka. Radde records its breeding in the Caucasus, on 
the Goktschai Lake, and in the Gilli marshes, also on the eastern slopes of the Kanly mountains, on the verge of the 
Ardahan plain, and as being very numerous in the Marschau swamps. It does not breed in the hot plains to the north 
of the Great Caucasus but is found again in the highlands of Armenia. 
Besides the countries just mentioned the Common Crane breeds in some localities in Southern Europe, but this must 
be regarded as rather exceptional. Thus for instance Prof. Giglioli (Ibis, 1881, p. 212) mentions the yearly breeding of 
a few pairs in the extensive marshes along the Adriatic, north of Venice. Wyatt has recorded its nesting in Macedonia, 
and Saunders found it breeding tolerably plentifully in the Donnana marshes in Andalucia, Southern Spain. 
It is not very long ago that comparatively little was known to ornithologists in general about the reproduction of 
the Crane. The Germans, of course, knew more about it than the more western naturalists, but even Naumann and 
Brehm are rather vague about details concerning the behaviour of the chicks and their parents. In 1859 Mr. J. Wolley 
gave in „The Ibis an excellent account of the breeding of the Crane in Lapland where he succeeded in finding eggs 
and chicks. 
I may as well give my own experience of the breeding of this species in Hanover in the spring of 1895. On the 
23rd of May I received a letter from Hanover to inform me that a pair of Cranes were nesting not very far from that 
town, and on the 24th. I was on the way to the old German Capital, where I arrived in the course of the evening 
just in time to get the necessary information for the proposed trip on the following day. Accordingly I set out next 
1) Lydekker, Ibis, 1891, p. 393. 
