22 Lost British Birds. 



body to practise his beautiful art on, is chronicled in the 

 newspapers. There the interest ends ; since the dead 

 bittern, having lost its " sublimity " with its life, is no 

 longer an object that any rational being can take pleasure 

 in contemplating. It is merely " something pretty in a glass 

 case." 



" Can nothing be done to stop the annual slaughter of 

 such visitants as these ? of which some few, I feel confident, 

 under a protective system, would still pretty regularly 

 remain to breed with us." 



Thus wrote Henry Stevenson, author of the Birds of 

 Norfolk, when near the end of his life. In the favoured 

 county where he had always lived, he had witnessed the 

 extermination of some beautiful and interesting species, and 

 had observed that others were annually becoming scarcer ; 

 and his soul at length revolted against the senseless and 

 hateful passion for killing every creature distinguished by its 

 beauty, strangeness, or rarity. But he could do no more 

 than ask, as so many others have asked during the last 

 half century, " Can nothing be done ? " 



XI. MARSH HARRIER Circus seruginosus. Once a 

 regular breeder, abundant in the fen district, and not 

 uncommon in suitable localities throughout the country ; now 

 regarded as extinct by most authorities. Hancock, in Birds 

 of Northumberland and Durham (1873) writes: "A few 

 years ago common on swampy moorlands, where it bred, 

 it has now almost disappeared under the policy of the game- 

 preserver, and is fallen, or is fast falling, from the rank of 

 a resident to that of a mere casual visitant. In 1823 I 

 took a nest of it, with four eggs, on the moors at Wemmer- 

 gill, near Middleton-on-Tees, the shooting-box of the late 

 Lord Strathmore. Both parent birds had been trapped or 

 shot by the gamekeeper, and formed part of his museum, 

 nailed against the stable-walls. This collection was made 

 up of Hawks, Owls, Daws, Buzzards, and such like ' vermin,' 

 both biped and quadruped, being altogether one of the 



