% 
Seg hg ot even in this book the faintest Larne of. it, — 3 
Review: Kearton’s British Birds’ Nests. 47 
others we tried. To him, be he still a boy or grown to man’s 
estate, who has gone birds’ nesting, this work strongly appeals. 
Though born in Leeds, the writer of this notice was taken 
when a child to live amidst fields and woods in the country. 
At an early age his father (John Crowther), a keen field- 
naturalist, taught him’ how to distinguish birds and find birds’ 
nests. His mind goes lovingly back to those and later days 
of birds’ nesting adventures. The run of a whole wood 
beneath the elders, the Starlings: under the Rooks’ nests. He 
remembers how he lay hid in the tall grass to watch the 
~Dunnock come creeping to its nest of sai blue eggs, and 
how, in his eagerness to see them, he nearly crushed a Yellow- 
hammer’s nest beneath his feet. He took the Kestrel from the 
tall fir tree, and the Starlings and Martins from the scarp of the 
quarry. Even the birds which nested: over the river were not 
free from his quest, for, in the scantiest attire, he went up the 
river and climbed the hawthorn hedges—he felt no thorns then, 
he was too eager to rob the nests of the Chaffinch, Thrush, and 
kindred birds, He haunted the bushes of bramble and wild-rose 
which sheltered: the Willow Wren, or crept along the rotten 
branch of the’ chestnut to. get the Stormcock’s nest, to fall, with 
bough and nest, some twenty feét or more, and remain insensible 
he knows not how long. He turns not a leaf of this delightful 
book, which deals with those birds’ and nests’ he’ knew in child- 
hood, without feeling the throb of those happy days again. 
Mr. Kearton i is a Yorkshireman, born in Muker, up in Swale- 
dale—many of us know it well—and in this: work of his he has | 
several illustrations from his own county and the moors of 
Westmorland, beyond his native village’ With so many workers 
a with’ the camera, ever on the look out for subjects, although to 
stamp the book with greater originality Messrs. Kearton have 
Procured some photographs from situations which few would 
are to visit, we may congratulate ourselves that a Yorkshireman 
_is the first in the field witha book of photographs of birds’ nests. 
Few, perhaps, have better opportunities in this district of knowing 
many of the uses to which the camera is being put in the pursuit 
_ of natural science’ than’ the writer, and he fears the danger in the 
future will be i in: too little observation and too much illustration ; 
