WILLIAMSON'S WEEKLY NATURE NOTES

I have never seen one myself. But I know another man who has. This was John Walpole-Bond, who compiled that monumental, three-volume History of Sussex Birds, published in 1938.

He reported the following: "In Sussex, as elsewhere, more or less pied varieties of the house sparrow are fairly common, and cinnamon and biscuit-coloured 'sports' are of tolerably frequent occurrence, but true albinos are much scarcer. I have personally come across specimens of all these phases."

If you read on through these records of the county's birds you will come to the tree sparrow, where Walpole-Bond comments: "In the Church Street museum, Brighton, from the Borrer collection is an albino tree-sparrow. But no data are attached to its ticket, so that it may or may not be of Sussex extraction."

William Borrer himself, son of the more famous father of the same name (whose Henfield herbarium of 6,600 different species was moved to Kew in 1862) says nothing of this albino in his book, The Birds of Sussex, published in 1894.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette August 8