64 THE RE-APPEARANCE OF PALLAS'S SAND GROUSE.
hardly fail, after coming so far, to cross the North Sea on a visit to our islands.
This they would appear to have done in considerable force. Near Hoddesdon, in
Herts, about forty have been seen in one covey, and on the Clifton estate, near
Nottingham, seven, 'of which two were shot,' alighted about the same time as the
forty flew over Rosehill. Others will, no doubt, be duly reported, until the
people with guns convert them into 'specimens,' or, in defiance of the Wild Bird
Preservation Act, into the materials for a very indifferent dish of game. This,
at all events, was their fate on the few previous occasions when, urged by some
strange impulse, these birds flew from the deserts of Mongolia right across
Europe to the western shores of Ireland, and thence made the tour of Great
Britain. Such visits have, however, been so rare, and attended with so many
peculiar features that they are events in the annals of ornithology. Pallas's sand
grouse, as the bird is generally called, is not really a grouse at all. It is, in fact,
more nearly allied to the pigeon family, though its habits and general appearance
have suggested the name it is usually known by. Its first appearance in scientific
literature was in 1773, when Pallas, the Russian naturalist, described it as an
inhabitant of the Kirghiz Steppes, on the western side of the Caspian. But it was
not until 1848 that a single straggler enabled it to be enumerated among the birds
of Europe, and not until eleven years later did the earliest pioneers reach our
shores. In July, 1859, one was captured not far from Norfolk, and a few more
were seen ; but by winter all of them had either been killed off or had taken their
departure, though it is not likely that any returned to their kin on the other side
of the Urals. Four years passed without any more being seen. Then suddenly,
in 1863, began the most notable of all these feathered irruptions from Asia into
Europe, extending as far north as Archangel, and as far south as the Adriatic,
while the vanguard of the invaders did not stop until they faced the roar of the
Atlantic on the coast of Donegal. Of this remarkable westward flight Prof.
Newton, of Cambridge, collected all the available records, so that we are able to
trace it with greater precision than the earlier and less accurately observed ones.
"On the 6th of May in that year the advanced guard of the invaders reached
Moravia, so that the probabilities" are that these, like their predecessors and
successors, came from the Kirghiz Steppes, that region being the point of their
habitat nearest Europe. In a fortnight they were reported from Heligoland, and
on the same day, according to Mr. Saunders, a flock of fourteen appeared at
Thropton, in Northumberland. By the next day they were in Staffordshire, and
directly afterwards in Norfolk and Suffolk, where the bird-stuffer was busily
employed upon some seventy or eighty that were killed, not to speak of a wounded
individual which lived for some time in the Zoological Gardens. Soon they were in
Lincolnshire, whence they spread up the east coast, until nearly every county in
Scotland received visits from them, and bestowed on the Asiatic tourists the usual
hospitality of the fowling-piece. At Unst, the most northern of the Shetland
Isles, a small flock was seen early in November, and one at Benbecula, in the
Hebrides, a month earlier, while others spread in the opposite direction, until
Kent, Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, South Devon, Land's End, and the Scilly Islands
had all been visited before the end of June. But by this time the exterminator had
buckled to action. In December several were shot in Lincolnshire, one survivor
of another flock fell in North Devon during the same month, and in February
1864, the last seen in the flesh was killed at Haverfordwest, in Pembrokeshire.
After this, no more seem to have been sighted even in Norfolk and Suffolk, which
throughout the eight months of their harrassed stay with us were their favourite