Birds of Guernsey (1879): And the Neighbouring Islands: Alderney, Sark, Jethou, Herm; Being a Small Contribution to the Ornitholony of the Channel IslandsSmith, Cecil
History
Birds of Guernsey (1879): And the Neighbouring Islands: Alderney, Sark, Jethou, Herm; Being a Small Contribution to the Ornitholony of the Channel Islands
Smith, Cecil
Birds -- Channel Islands
The Dotterel is included in Professor Ansted's list, and by him marked
as having occurred in Guernsey and Sark. I should think Alderney a more
likely place for the bird to have occurred than Sark, but I have not
been able to gain any information about its occurrence there; neither
the carpenter bird-stuffer nor his sporting friend had a skin or any
part of the bird. There is no specimen now in the Museum.
106. RING DOTTEREL. _Ægialitis hiaticula_, Linnaeus. French, "Grand
pluvier à collier," "Pluvier à collier."--The Ring Dotterel is very
common in all the Islands in places suited to it. Some remain throughout
the summer, and a few of these, but certainly very few, may breed in the
Islands; the great majority, however, of those that frequent the coast
in the winter are migrants, arriving in the autumn and departing again
in the spring. Some, however, appear to arrive very early, and cannot
have bred very far off, perhaps on the neighbouring coast of France or
Dorset. I have the following note on the subject in the 'Zoologist' for
1866, which gives the time of their arrival pretty correctly. During the
first two or three weeks after my arrival--that was on the 21st of June,
1866--I found Ring Dotterels excessively scarce even on parts of the
coast, where, on other visits later in the year, I had found them very
numerous. Towards the middle of July, however, they began to frequent
their usual haunts in small parties of six or seven, most probably the
old birds with their young. These parties increased in number to twenty
or thirty, and before my departure, on the last day of July, they
mustered quite as thickly as I had ever seen them before. On another
summer visit to Guernsey, from the 3rd to the 19th of June, 1876, I did
not see any Ring Dotterel at all, though at the time Kentish Plover were
common in most of the bays in the low parts of the Island. The Ring
Dotterel must therefore have selected some breeding-place separate from
the Kentish Plover, probably not very far off; but I do not believe it
breeds at all commonly in the Islands. This agrees very much with what I
saw of the Ring Dotterel this year (1878); there were a few in
L'Ancresse and one or two other bays, but none in Grand Havre, close to
which I was living, and I very much doubt if any of those I saw were
breeding. Neither Colonel l'Estrange nor I found any eggs, though we
searched hard for them both in '76 and '78; neither did we find any eggs
either in Herm or Alderney.
Professor Ansted includes the Ring Dotterel in his list, but marks it
as only occurring in Guernsey. There is a specimen in the Museum.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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