4 Lost British Birds. 



sight of them even by travelling long distances and spend- 

 ing many days in waiting and watching. The eagles and 

 buzzards and kite ; the raven, chough, grey lag goose, great 

 skua, roseate tern, dotterel, bearded tit, Dartford warbler 

 what are the lives of such species as these really worth ? It 

 would be idle to retain them in a work on British birds which 

 is not intended to be out of date one or two decades hence. 

 This done, a couple of hundreds of species will remain in the 

 work, which, in its sadly mutilated condition, will better 

 deserve its title ; and the conviction will by this time have 

 forced itself on its owner, that we have a very mag- 

 nificent bird population on paper, but a very poor one in 

 reality. It should be added that of this reduced number 

 (200), a large proportion are never seen by those whose life 

 is confined to land : they are pelagic, and only to be met with 

 out at sea, or in the neighbourhood of those " naked melan- 

 choly isles " which so few of us, however great our love of 

 birds may be, are ever able to visit. 



The saddest feature in the case is that invariably the 

 finest species are the first doomed : they have indeed been 

 and are being selected for slaughter "for the handsomeness 

 of the same." By placing side by side two sets of draw- 

 ings, representing, in the one case, species that are gone 

 and are going, and, in the other, such as are common, an excel- 

 lent object-lesson can be had. The greatly reduced black and 

 white drawings in this pamphlet give but a faint idea of the 

 wonderful beauty of the types represented. Let the reader 

 turn rather to the magnificent coloured illustrations in Lord 

 Lilford's work on " British Birds," and look out these thir- 

 teen lost types, and as many others representing species on 

 the verge of extinction twenty- six in all ; then compare 

 them with the drawings of twenty-six predominant species, 

 that are in no danger of extirpation. He will realize, as 

 he never realized before, the greatness of the change whicli 

 is going on in the character of our bird population. He 

 will see that the noblest and most beautiful forms, all those 

 which gave greatest lustre to our wild bird life, were first 

 singled out for destruction ; that the next in order of merit 



