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NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 
Our Rarer Birds: being Studies in Ornithology and Oology. 
By Cuartes Dixon. With Twenty Illustrations by Cuar.es 
Wauymrer, and a Frontispiece by J. G. KeruLemans, 
8vo. pp. 873. London: Richard Bentley & Son. 1888. 
THE title of Mr. Dixon’s book is not well chosen, for to those 
who are tolerably familiar with British birds it does not convey 
an accurate indication of the contents. We will not do Mr. 
Dixon the injustice to suppose that he really regards as rarities 
a number of Birds which most naturalists agree in considering 
very common (that is, common in their natural haunts and at their 
proper seasons); but when we find classed as rarities such 
familiar species as the Brown Owl, the Butcher-bird, Nightingale, 
Reed Warbler, Green Woodpecker, Nightjar, Stock Dove, Turtle 
Dove, three or four kinds of game, and such well-known shore- 
birds and sea-birds as any one may meet with in the course of an 
ordinary walk along the coast, we fail entirely to appreciate the 
author’s idea of rarity. That he has enjoyed good opportunities 
however for studying a variety of birds in their natural haunts 
is evident from his descriptions, many of which are well written, 
and accurate so far as they go, though they do not contain much 
that is new. The freshest paragraphs, perhaps, are those which 
relate to the habits of some of our British birds as observed 
abroad, and these are interesting enough. Take, for example, the 
case of our well-known Hawfinch, concerning which Mr. Dixon 
writes :— 
“Thad many opportunities of studying the habits of the Hawfinch in 
the evergreen-oak forests of northern Africa. One would almost be led to 
think that the cause of the bird’s shyness in England was owing tu the 
manner in which it is persecuted by gardeners and collectors, if we did not 
find it just as wild and wary in these forest solitudes where it is never 
molested by man. I first met with the Hawfinches in a clearing of the 
forest, where the trees were scattered up and down in little clusters, and, 
as a rule, it was only when they flew from tree to tree that I could get a 
view of them. Sometimes I observed them sitting quietly among the 
branches, turning their large heads from side to side in evident alarm, and 
peering about in all directions as if in search of the danger. The flight of 
the Hawfinch is undulating, but sometimes straightforward, and is then 
