r 9 a i • J 
On the Birds of Alderney. 
415 
XXIII .—Notes on the Birds of Alderney. 
By Major W. R. Thompson, R.A., M.B.O.U. 
For much of the information contained in the following- 
notes I am indebted to my friend, that good sportsman, 
Major L. J. A. Langlois, of the Royal Alderney Artillery 
and Engineers. Without his aid they would have been 
far less full, and more especially are my thanks due to him 
for that valuable table giving the date of arrival on the 
island of the first Woodcock. 
Langlois has lived and shot, or I should rather say, shot and 
lived—-he himself would put the shooting first—-in Alderney 
since 1885, and has at his house, “Holmwood,” a small but 
well set up collection of many of the rarer visitors—birds, 
not human beings—to the island. I make further acknow¬ 
ledgement of his assistance in the text, where, since his 
name would perforce appear so frequently, I have denoted 
him by his initial “ L.” 
My own observations of the avifauna of the island com¬ 
menced on the date of my first joining the station in 
November 1912, and continued, with intervals, until the 
1st of August, 1914, when, owing to the imminence of war, 
the Garrison Company in which I was then serving left the 
island. I was again posted to Alderney in 1918, and landed 
on the 8th of November, since when my observations have 
continued to the present time, July 1920, with the all impor¬ 
tant exception of a period of six weeks during the autumn 
migration of 1919, when I had the misfortune to be away 
on duty. 
The Island of Alderney will be found fully described in 
the guide books, but a few remarks from an ornithological 
view-point are perhaps called for. The island, then, is situated 
in latitude 49° 43' North and longitude 2° 12' West. It is 
the most northerly of the Channel Islands, and lies about 
nine miles in a westerly direction from the nearest point 
on the coast of France, Cap de la Hague, on the Cotentin 
Peninsula. From the point of view of migration it is the 
