26 London Birds. 



impossible to keep house and be a joyful mother of 

 children, stepped in in the person of the keeper with 

 a clutch of Ducks' eggs, which were safely hatched. 

 For some reason or other the ducklings did not 

 thrive perhaps, because the old maid was too 

 fussily anxious and gave them no peace, or, perhaps 

 (as the keeper who watched them believed to be 

 the case), because her sharp note jarred on ears 

 which nature had designed for a mother's call in 

 another key, frightening the poor little "boarded 

 out" babies and making them restless and before 

 long the foster parents again were childless. 



A couple of hundred years ago no one, with any 

 pretence to education, would have been foolish 

 enough to expect anything but failure in such an 

 experiment as the park-keepers, Barnicles " fowles 

 like to wylde ghees which growen wonderly 

 vpon trees " being, as every one knew, the excep- 

 tion that proved the rule that birds are hatched from 

 eggs. 



The belief that the Bernicle Goose grew from the 

 " pedunculated cirripede " that bears its name 

 (Lepas Anatiferd) lingered perhaps the longer 

 because it was good for the Monks of Holy Isle 

 and other northern monastries. " Men of relegyon " 

 we are told in one of Caxton's priceless volumes, 

 "eet Barnacles vpon fastynge days bycause they 

 ben not engendered with flesche." 



Hudibras made a slip in his natural history when 

 he said that 



" Bernicles turn Soland geese 

 In th' Islands of the Orcades" ! 



The first black Swans which were imported from 



