TRANS ACT IONS
SOME HELMINTHS FROM FRESH WATER BIRDS IN SUFFOLK By MARY BEVERLEY-BURTON (MRS. D. F. METTRICK).
*Department of Zoology and Applied Entomology, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, S.W.7. INTRODUCTION
THE helminths of birds have, during the last 150 years, been the subject of a large number of papers and monographs, and the European fauna is thus reasonably well known. In Britain, however, very few collections from wild birds have been made. In 1844 both Bellingh am and Thompson published papers on parasites of birds in Ireland. In 1911 the Grouse Disease Committee published a report which included information on the helminthic fauna and Meggitt (1916) reported on the parasites of sparrows collected in the Midlands. Since 1920 several authors have presented papers on avian helminths but most of these are lists of the parasites of domesticated birds, e.g., Lewis (1930) Foggie (1933), Davies (1938), Owen (1951) and Soliman (1955) who were all concemed with domestic duck. Almost the only records of helminths of wild Anatids in Britain are those of Rosseter (1891, 1898, 1911), who described several species of the genus Hymenolopis from duck, and of Baylis (1928, 1939) who published a list of helminths collected from British vertebrates. Many of the foreign papers on helminths of wild birds have included information on the parasites of Anseriformes and other fresh water birds but few have been concerned exclusively with these hosts. In North America, Gower (1938) examined a large number of duck (mostly Mallard) that were shot in Michigan. He only commented on the trematode fauna (flukes) and did not consider the cestodes (tapeworms) or nematodes (roundworms). Later, (1939) Gower published a list of the helminths which had been recorded from duck up to 1939. Schiler (1951) *Present Address. Department of Zoology, University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.