14 KINGFISHER. 
This specimen I have now preserved. The question has been 
raised as to whether the Kinefisher is a difficult bird to shoot 
or not: the above is my experience on the subject. 
The Kingfisher is a native of Europe, Asia, and Africa, 
It inhabits the temperate parts of Russia and Siberia; in 
Denmark it is rare. It is found in Germany, France, Hol- 
land, Italy, and Greece. In the other two continents 1t is 
likewise widely dispersed. In this country it is universally, 
though nowhere numerously diffused. ¢ is a splendid bird, 
its iridescent colowrs varying according to the light they are 
seen in, from bright torquoise blue to the deepest ereen in 
some parts of its plumage, and in others the darker colours 
of copper and gold. When dead, however, much of its beauty 
1s gone; and one writer has imagined that even alive, it has, 
when perceiving that it is observed, the power of dimming the 
resplendency of its plumage, as if conscious how marked an 
object it otherwise was; and I fancy that some idea of the 
sort has before now occurred to myself. 
In Yorkshire, this bird is as frequently to be met with as 
in other parts ‘of the country, but, speaking of the neigh- 
bourhood of Huddersfield, Mr. W. Eddison writes to Mr. Allis, 
“The destructive plan of snaring them or catching them with 
bird-lime will shortly place them in the list of rare birds;’ 
nd Mr. Richard Leyland, ‘to the same,’ says—‘In autumn, 
an assemblage of them in some of the narrow olens, or cloughs, 
as they are called about Halifax, takes place; probably the 
river swollen by the autumnal rains renders the acquisition 
of their food difficult, and consequently compels them to seek 
it in shallow water. A bird-stuffer, with whom’ I was well 
acquainted, procured in one season more than fifty specimens 
by placing a net across the bottom of a clough, and com- 
mencing to beat the bushes from above, which drove every 
bird into it.’ It is to be wished that he had confined 
himself to the more sportsman-like use of the arrows, for 
which ‘Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudeslie’ were 
so famous, when ‘merrie it was under the greenwood tree.’ 
In Northumberland, near Neweastle-on-Tyne, in December, 
1849, and January, 1850, great numbers of the Kinefisher 
appeared, more coming into the hands of one game-dealer 
than he had had durmg the previous sixteen or eighteen 
years. In Scotland it is much less frequent than with us. 
One was shot near St. Andrews, in 1834. In Sutherlandshire 
it is rare. 
