19.  SPOTTED FLYCATCHER. Muscicapa grisola, Linnaeus.  French, “Gobe-mouche gris.”—­The Spotted Flycatcher is a regular and numerous summer visitant, generally quite as numerous in certain localities as in England, its arrival and departure being about the same time.  It occurs also in Sark and Herm, and probably in Alderney, but I do not remember having seen one there.  In Guernsey it is perhaps a little local in its distribution, avoiding to a great extent such places as the Vale and the open ground on the cliffs, but in all the gardens and orchards it is very common.

Spotted Flycatchers appear, however, to vary in numbers to a certain extent in different years.  This year, 1878, they came out in great force, especially on the lawn at Candie where they availed themselves to a large extent of the croquet-hoops, from which they kept a good look-out either for insects on the wing or on the ground, and they might be as frequently seen dropping to the ground for some unfortunate creeping thing that attracted their attention as rising in the air to give chase to something on the wing.  Certainly, when I was in Guernsey about the same time in 1866, Spotted Flycatchers did not appear to be quite so numerous as in 1878.  This was probably only owing to one of those accidents of wind and weather which render migratory birds generally, less numerous in some years than they are in others, however much they may wish and endeavour, which seems to be their usual rule, to return to their former breeding stations.

Professor Ansted mentions the Spotted Flycatcher in his list, but does not add, as he usually does, any letter showing its distribution through the Islands.  This probably is because it is generally distributed through them all.  There is no specimen in the Museum.

20.  GOLDEN ORIOLE. Oriolus galbula, Linnaeus.  French, “Le Loriot.”—­I have never seen the bird alive or found any record of the occurrence of the Golden Oriole in Guernsey or the neighbouring Islands, and beyond the fact that there was one example—­a female—­in the Museum (which may have been from Jersey) I had been able to gain no information on the subject except of a negative sort.  No specimen had passed through the hands of the local bird-stuffers certainly for a good many years, for Mr. Jago’s mother who about twenty or thirty years ago, when she was Miss Cumber, had been for some considerable time the only bird-stuffer in the Island, told me she did not know the bird, and had never had one through her hands.  It seemed to me rather odd that a bird which occurs almost every year in the British Islands, occasionally even as far west as Ireland, as a straggler, and which is generally distributed over the continent of Europe in the summer, should be totally unknown in the Channel Islands.  Consequently writing to the ‘Star’ about another Guernsey bird—­a Hoopoe—­which had been recorded in that paper, I asked for information as to the occurrence of the Golden Oriole in the Islands,