72 
NATURE NOTES. 
THE DECREASE OF KINGFISHERS. 
HE kingfisher has suffered from three wasting causes, 
fly-fishing, famine, and finery, (i) As to the first, a 
curious nemesis befalls him. As he has caught fish in 
his life, his dead feathers, made into artificial flies, 
tempt the fishes again, as they probably tempted them in the 
bird’s life. A good many years ago the sight of a kingfisher on 
the Cherwell, near Nell Bridge, Oxfordshire, provoked a veteran 
fisherman to the ardent wish that he had a gun in his hand 
instead of a fishing-rod, and it was with a spasm that he saw 
the poor blue halcyon pass by unscathed and saved by Apollo. 
As the bird gipsies only and is a very poor migrant, and as his 
transcendant lustre soon makes his whereabouts known, fly- 
fishers can take their time and easily supply themselves. (2) 
Famine from sharp protracted frost is a far more wholesale 
destroyer of these poor birds. Captain Willoughby Verner, 
a comparative ornithologist of wide repute, to whose art we owe 
the beautiful case of terns at South Kensington, told me that 
between Romney Marsh and Winchelsea a bird stuffer had 
received more than sixty birds (kingfishers) to be stuffed this 
winter. Some were frozen to starvation and death, others shot. 
In a shop in Brighton, at the beginning of December, a tiara of 
twelve dead kingfishers was laid out for the ladies, and I grieve 
to tell Mr. Warde Fowler, whose halcyon letter hardly meets the 
sternness of facts, that Oxfordshire has not escaped, for Mr. Derby, 
of Market Street, Oxford, taxidermist, received fifty kingfishers 
this last winter. The birds, it is said, were thin and half starved, 
and had been picked up in the neighbourhood of Oxford ; hardly 
any were shot. One poor creature was found in the ice in an 
upright position : its beak was just touching the water and had 
become frozen and fixed to the ice. (3) The third plague that 
the poor kingfishers undergo is the worst, most inhuman, and 
most unscientific, though Mr. Fowler does not notice it at all. 
Would that modern ladies arranged their head gear on Aaron’s 
principle of “ bonnets for beauty ! ” In March, 1887, a servant 
girl was to be seen disfiguring the High Street of Winchester, 
by a great sprawling contorted kingfisher made to wriggle over 
her otherwise comely face. And hereabouts in Sussex, hinds of 
the mill, with one exception, have been shooting kingfishers for 
several 3’ears for their charmers ; and whereas in 1884, you 
might go down the Rother below Midhurst, at this time of }'ear 
and see seven or eight kingfishers in a mile, now there are 
hardly any at all visible. “ They are gone, they are dead.” 
Let your readers remark it is the present combination of all 
three devastators that is most to be dreaded for a vety tender 
and delicate subject. And the pity is that Mr. Fowler’s criti- 
cism (however kindly), on my remarks as being inaccurate, may 
lull the well wishers of the kingfishers into security, at a crisis 
such as has not occurred before. They may be inclined to sa}’, 
