BRITISH BIRDS, 

 THEIR EGGS AND NESTS. 



N the following passes I shall endeavour, as far as my subject 

 will permit, to avoid mere dry and uninteresting detail. It is, of 

 course, quite inconsistent with the nature of the book to omit 

 matter-of-fact descriptions altogether, or even in any very great 

 degree ; but an effort will be made to relieve the whole from 

 wearing the appearance of a catalogue in disguise, and to give it 

 as much of a life-like practical character as possible. How many 

 incidents in a school-hoy's life are connected, in his memory, 

 with some nesting expedition, some recollection of, perhaps, an 

 accidental discovery of a nest and eggs he had never seen before, 

 or possibly wished and tried to find, but always wished and 

 tried in vain. Such experiences are always pleasant and interesting 

 in their detail to the real lover of birds and their belongings ; 

 and often almost as much so when detailed by others as when 

 reproduced in his own recollections of former days, and their 

 hopes, and plans, and successes, and disappointments, each often 

 renewed, or often repeated under some varying form Why, 

 then, should not such matters stand here and there in these 

 pages ? 



Our plan, therefore, will be to omit all special notice of the 

 nests and eggs of so-called " British Birds," whose only claim to 

 the designation lies in their having been met with once or twice 

 or even some half-dozen times in the British Isles : to omit it, 

 that is, in the body of the book, and to give such reference or 

 description of at least the more interesting species and their eggs, 

 as space may allow, in an Appendix. Accounts will be, however, 

 given of the habits of nidification and the eg<*s of all unques- 

 tionably British birds, even although their breeaing habitat be in 

 another country, or most rarely and exceptionally within the com- 

 pass of the British seas ; such birds, for instance, as the Field- 



