250 Bird-Life in London. 



place every winter. Whenever the weather is 

 hard these birds come up the river literally in 

 thousands, and they have become one of the winter 

 sights of London. The simple fact that they do so 

 is not astonishing in itself, but it is somewhat 

 curious that they should, some five or six years 

 ago, have suddenly adopted the habit, while before 

 that time they were only represented by an occa- 

 sional straggler. 



The list of birds that have left town during even 

 the last ten years never, we fear, to return is a 

 somewhat large one, but we must content ourselves 

 with mentioning the martins and flycatchers. The 

 spotted flycatcher, not many years ago common in 

 Kensington Gardens and the neighbourhood, seems 

 now to have entirely deserted its former haunts, 

 and the martins have gone with it. The cause of 

 this disappearance is, we think, sufficiently clear, 

 but is not usually, in our opinion, satisfactorily 

 explained. So high an authority as Mr. Howard 

 Saunders, for example, in his very valuable 

 "Manual of British Birds," gives it as his 

 opinion that the martins were driven out of 

 their former nesting-places in the West-end of 

 London by sparrows ; but though without doubt 

 sparrows exist in London in countless thousands, 

 and though equally without doubt they are the 

 greatest possible enemies to nesting martins, as 

 they ruthlessly dispossess them as soon as they have 

 completed the outer walls of their nests, yet we 

 cannot think that sparrows alone are to blame in 



