THE DECREASE OF KINGFISHERS. 73. 
“ An exaggeration contradicted : the thing will right itself and 
Cassandra had better shut up.” 
My statement that the kingfisher was “cruelly persecuted and 
decreasing, in Hampshire” was taken verbatim from Mr. Kelsall’s 
“Birds of Hampshire, Southampton, 1890.” The Newcastle 
Chronicle has, for many years, told the same tale of wide tracts 
in the North of England. At the time I spoke of Oxfordshire 
the noble work of Mr. Aplin’s was not available, or I might have 
qualified my remark ; but I spoke as an Oxfordshire man of 
nearly threescore years of friendship with the birds of Oxford- 
shire, having had thirty-one years’ residence amongst them, and 
occasional but regular access to them since, and having for many 
years made a point of inquiring from many residents in various 
parts of Oxfordshire as to the numbers of the kingfishers extant 
in their vicinity. My observation, however, is chiefly limited to 
the Cherwell. At Marston, E. C. Simeon, Esq., reports (March, 
1891) that the boating (?) has driven them from their old haunts ; 
for many years I have not seen one there, nor in several visits to 
Upper Heyford and the Upper Cherwell. The last kingfisher 
that I saw alive and free, barring that Sussex fugitive reported 
to you in my last, was at a bend in the Cherwell between King 
Sutton Station and Adderbury, in March, 1888. One has an eye- 
hunger for this bird, and it is like parting with a bit of one’s life 
to have seen it so seldom of late. In early years it was a plea- 
sant remembrance of Suscot, Marston Meadows, the Weirs, 
Iffley, Nuneham, Adderbury (Nell Bridge, and brook near 
Bodicote Grange), Wigginton, Swerford, Broughton. Concern- 
ing the last, the Rev. C. F. Wyatt has the cheering report 
“ slightly more frequent,” but this does not take into account the 
fang of the late severe winter. It must be remarked that 
Oxfordshire, penetrated throughout its whole extent with its 
many river systems and bowery island recesses, all of them 
bird refuges, ought to be pre-eminently strong in kingfishers, 
and no one would rejoice to hear that it is so more than myself.*' 
But my point is, that wheresoever and whensoever he may be 
found, the kingfisher has been so hardly hit of late, that he ought 
to be spared like dear life, for a long time to come, and that for 
the sake of 11s all and Old England to boot. Poor eisvogel ! 
he appears at the ice time ; the people count his dead in the ice- 
bergs, and think he is more numerous than he is — his last hoard 
gives out at such a time inexorable, and is gone. 
The latter part of my “ Plea for Birds,” which did not appear 
in Nature Notes, is not at all intended to counsel despair. I 
certainly believe in man very much, and specially in political 
man, and a stricter Birds’ Preservation Act, and also in County 
* On the river plains of Oxford you may row “by many a mere and many an ea ; 
through narrow reaches of clear brown glassy water ; between the dark green 
alders : between the pale-green reeds ; where the coot clanked, and the bittern 
boomed, and the sedge bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the 
notes of all the birds around.”- — (Kingsley’s Hereward the l Vake, p. 251.) 
