2 Lost British Birds. 



The statement is often made that the total disappearance 

 of some species of birds, and the extreme rarity of others, 

 once common in this country, is due to the draining of the 

 marshes, an improved system of cultivation, and kindred 

 causes ; and there is no doubt that some aquatic birds that 

 breed in communities would suffer greatly from the breaking 

 up of their ancestral nesting-places. But when we look into 

 the facts relating to the disappearance of the species noticed 

 in this paper, we find that most of them were lost through 

 the direct action of man. Fowlers, gamekeepers, collectors, 

 cockney sportsmen, and louts with guns, pursued them to the 

 death, even as they are now pursuing all our rarer species. 



We know that birds are exceedingly tenacious of their 

 breeding-places, and that when not too much persecuted, 

 they rapidly adapt themselves to altered conditions. 



In remote, savage and scarcely habitable regions of the 

 earth, the white egrets have been almost exterminated by 

 feather-hunters, to provide suitable ornaments for the ladies 

 of Paris and London. On the other hand, close to our 

 shores, in Holland a populous and highly-cultivated coun- 

 trythe large white stork is abundant, and so fearless of 

 man, that it builds its nests and rears its young on the 

 roofs of houses. But we need not go so far as Holland, nor 

 indeed out of London, for evidence of the fact that birds will 

 thrive in conditions apparently most unsuited to them so 

 long as man refrains from their persecution. To rooks, 

 magpies, moor-hens, dabchicks, and shy wood-pigeons, all at 

 once grown strangely tame and breeding in parks and 

 squares and gardens, may now be added troops of gulls of 

 three species that spend the winter on our ornamental 

 waters, and grow familiar with the human form. 



To come now to the question which most nearly concerns 

 us namely, what do our losses in bird life really amount to, 

 or, in other words, what proportion does this list of thirteen 

 bear to the whole number of British species ? 



The number of the lost may not seem large to those who 

 are not ornithologists, and who have on their shelves a costly 

 work on " British Birds," in, say, six or eight splendidly 



