Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/36

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THE ZOOLOGIST.

conferred by Pallas at an earlier date. As will be seen, however, it had to disappear for a time from the British list, as it was further discovered that Mr. Hancock's bird had been wrongly determined, and belonged to a closely allied species, the Motacilia superciliosa of Gmelin, the Yellow-browed Warbler. Mr. Swinhoe pointed out the distinctive features of the two birds in the 'Proceedings' of the Zoological Society for I860 ("Catalogue of the Birds of China"), p. 297, and further stated that Mr. Hancock's specimen was specifically identical with examples of the Yellow-browed Warbler obtained in China. Thus we lost the Dalmatian Warbler as a British bird, and obtained the Yellow-browed Warbler in its place.

In the 'Ibis' (1867, p. 252) Mr. Hancock corrects his previous determination of the bird killed by him in 1838, stating in what respects he found it to differ from Gould's Regulus modestus; and Mr. Gould does the same in the second volume of his 'Birds of Great Britain' (1873), when referring to the confusion which had arisen in consequence of Mr. Hancock's bird having been regarded by many authors as specifically identical with that received from Baron Feldegg, and figured by him in the 'Birds of Europe' under the impression that it was a newly discovered species. It may be mentioned here that Phylloscopus superciliosus has subsequently been met with in Britain in some eleven instances, one of which was on our own coast at Cley on Oct. 1st, 1894. Having thus disposed of this puzzling subject, we may turn to the bird under immediate consideration.

The next and only other occurrence of Pallas's Willow Warbler (Dalmatian Warbler) in Europe, until the Norfolk specimen, so far as I know, is that mentioned by Herr Gätke in his 'Birds of Heligoland' (p. 293). On Oct. 6th, 1845, Claus Aeuckens, one of his most devoted collectors, then a youth, and not having arrived at the age when he might be trusted with powder and shot, armed only with "a hunting-bag full of rounded pebbles, which he knew how to employ with the most astonishing dexterity," killed a small Warbler with one of his stones "as it was flying round the face of the cliff, and completely crushed it against the rock." Aeuckens noticed that the bird was an unusual one, and brought a wing which had remained undamaged, "with a portion of the lower part of the back with part of the