PREFACE 13 



inherent shyness as to take food from the hand, and the 

 lakes, where Moorhens and Dabchicks are as much at 

 home as the pinioned waterfowl with which they 

 fraternise. The northern suburbs may have changed 

 for the worse, but it is not so long since we could hear 

 half-a-dozen Nightingales in full song and as many 

 Blackcaps any spring morning at Highgate, and could 

 there meet with birds so little likely to court obser- 

 vation as the Bullfinch and Hawfinch, while the 

 notes of Nuthatch and Woodpecker came from private 

 grounds which had retained some well-grown timber, 

 and at dusk the Nightjar droned from the Bishop's 

 Wood. The same neighbourhood recalls our first 

 acquaintance with the quiet, seldom-heard song of 

 the Butcher-bird, and a stroll over Hampstead Heath, 

 of blessed memory, furnished a list of birds which would 

 have done credit to a country ramble. Does the moor- 

 hen still haunt the Hampstead ponds, — scene of Mr. 

 Pickwick's researches into the theory of tittlebats, — and 

 does the sand-martin still burrow near by ? With 

 what joy we fled to those oases from the vast desert of 

 bricks and mortar. 



To such length have we been led by the desire to 

 show that nowhere in our favoured land need the 

 naturalist find his occupation gone. Hopeful, too, is 

 the growing enlightenment of the youthful mind due 

 to the inclusion of nature-study in the school-curricu- 

 lum, so that no longer need we fear such errors of 

 identification as that vouched for by a friend of ours, 

 who, passing two small boys, who were leaning over a 

 gate watching the excited evolutions of a pair of lap- 

 wings in the field beyond, heard one of them asseverate, 

 " I tell you they are tom-tits." Closer knowledge and 

 awakened interest will even prompt the village urchin 

 to a better treatment of birds than has been the case in 



