ON THE OCCURRENCE OF PALLAS'S WILLOW
WARBLER IN NORFOLK.
By Thomas Southwell.
In the December number of 'The Zoologist' I had the pleasure briefly to record the occurrence of a specimen of the above rare Warbler, Phylloscopus proregulus (Pall.), at Cley-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, on Oct. 31st last.Mr. Ramm, the person who shot the bird, tells me that he found it amongst the long grass on the bank or sea-wall, not far from the sea, at Cley, a locality which has produced many rare migrants, and at first took it for a Goldcrest, but on approaching to within two or three yards, the bird being very tame, he thought he recognized a Yellow-browed Warbler, a species he had seen before, and therefore secured it. Mr. Pashley, of Cley, to whom the bird was sent for preservation, forwarded it to me for determination, as he had some doubt whether it was really a Yellow-browed Warbler; and, with the assistance of Mr. Gurney, we were able to identify it as Pallas's Willow Warbler, Phylloscopus proregulus. This Mr. Dresser was good enough to confirm; he also exhibited the specimen, which proved on dissection to be a female, probably adult, at the meeting of the Zoological Society on Dec. 1st, 1896.
Considerable confusion exists in the writings of the ornithologists of the first half of the present century with regard to two nearly allied species of this difficult group. I should therefore be glad if you will allow me to make a few remarks, which I hope may assist in placing in a clearer light the history of the claims of this, and the Yellow-browed Warbler, to be regarded as accidental migrants to the eastern shore of Great Britain.
Phylloscopus proregulus seems to have been first described by Pallas in the 'Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica,' which appeared in 1811, but was probably little known (if at all) to British ornithologists till the publication of Gould's 'Birds of Europe' in 1837 (vol. ii. p. 149), where Mr. Gould describes a bird, then new to him, and as he also believed new to science, which he named Regulus modestus,
