XXIII. 
NOTES ON BIRDS OBSERVED IN HERTFORDSHIRE DURING 
THE YEAR 1884. 
Ey Johf E. Littleboy. 
Bead at Watford, 3rd March, 1885. 
Ix presenting to our members my seventh annual report, I have the 
pleasure of announcing the addition of twelve species to our register, 
a number I certainly never expected again to reach. The birds 
which I am now about to mention—the fire-crest, the waxwing, the 
mealy redpoll, the chough, the little bittern, the black tern, the 
kittiwake, the great northern diver, the gannet, the sheldrake, the 
garganejq and the shoveller—increase our number to 166 species. 
Information respecting the Avifauna of the Banbury district, which 
comprises the northern portion of Oxfordshire, and parts of 
Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, has been very ably and 
zealously collected by Mr. Oliver V. Aplin, of Banbury, and he has 
succeeded in registering 180 species. I may state that the Cherwell, 
a branch of the river Thames, runs right through the district, and 
affords a congenial resort to multitudes of waterfowl, and that Mr. 
Aplin has registered all well-authenticated species, however remote 
may have been the date of their occurrence. When it is remembered 
that the, 166 species on our own register have all been recorded 
within the last seven or eight years, and that we have in Hert¬ 
fordshire no attractions for water-fowl at all comparable to the 
Cherwell, I think we may consider that satisfactory progress has 
been made. 
As on former occasions, I shall now proceed to notice seriatim the 
birds just mentioned. Mr. Henry Seebohm has very kindly supplied 
me with manuscript notes respecting nearly all of them. In order 
to avoid the repetition of his name, I shall simply mark all extracts 
from his notes with inverted commas. 
1. The Eire-crest (Regulus ignicapillus). — Mr. S. Chapman, of 
Bennington, near Stevenage, informs me that these exquisite little 
birds are occasionally to be seen during the autumn months in a 
plantation of larch and Scotch firs, of about seven acres in extent, 
which stands upon a good slope, facing the south, within about fifty 
yards of his own house. He states that large numbers of gold- 
crests are constantly to be found in the same wood, that he has 
watched them most carefully, and has had every opportunity of 
distinguishing between the two species. “ The fire-crested wren has 
a very restricted range,* its northern limit appearing to be the 
Baltic provinces. It winters in the south of Erance, in some parts 
of Italy, in the Islands of Sardinia and Malta, and is very common 
in Algeria. The fire-crests that visit England are probably 
accidental visitors from the Continent; they appear most frequently 
in Cornwall, and the inference is that they are wanderers from 
Erance, where the bird is common in pine forests.” 
* Seebohm’s ‘British Birds,’ vol. i, p.458. 
VOL. III.—PART VI. 
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