152 
NATURE NOTES. 
crested wren (the smallest British bird) will stand unconcerned 
till you come within three or four yards of it, while the bustard 
{otis), the largest British land fowl, does not care to admit a 
person within so many furlongs.” This is, partly at all events, 
why the large fine birds disappear with the advance of civilisa- 
tion before the smaller species. 
Some families of birds are tamer and more inclined to court 
the company of man than others ; but even among them there 
are exceptions. The crow family is a good instance of this. Far 
more rookeries are placed close to human habitations than at a 
distance from them — and this despite the annual rook- shooting 
when the branchers are out of the nests in May. The carrion 
crow, a wild wary bird as a rule, becomes tame when he is safe. 
We have heard his croak in the earl}^ hours of a summer 
morning in Kensington (perhaps the cry of one of the birds 
which, we are told, live in Holland Park and sometimes nest in 
Kensington Gardens), and the tameness of crows in Switzerland 
was truly surprising. You will find the magpie a difficult bird to 
sb.oot in England now, but we read in “ Yarrell ” that it was 
not always of so retiring a disposition in this country, and that 
in Scandinavia it is a familiar bird about homesteads. Yet, who 
ever knew jays tame and familiar ? They are ever birds of the 
woodlands. When Mr. Hudson writes of rooks, magpies, 
moorhens, dabchicks and shy wood-pigeons, “ all at once grown 
strangely tame,” and breeding in parks and squares and gardens, 
he mentions some species peculiarly amenable to taming influ- 
ences. Some of them are to be found tame in the country. 
Moorhens get nearly as familiar as barndoor fowls. I knew a 
village garden, with a pond at the bottom of it, where dabchicks 
always bred, and shy wood-pigeons grow tame in the breeding 
season in districts where they are among the wildest of birds in 
the winter, and nest in ornamental trees in gardens. On the 
other hand, why should woodpeckers be shy while nuthatches 
are so familiar ? And who (knowing the bird) would expect the 
stone curlew to be ever as tame as the peewit, though both nest 
on fallows ? The shy stone curlew has gone (from some of its 
former haunts), while the bolder peewit is still with us, despite the 
gathering of its eggs. The bittern never made itself ffimiliar 
like the heron, though both were protected by law as long ago 
as 1533. The bullfinch is always a less confiding bird than the 
goldfinch, although it has been no more persecuted, save in the 
case of the few birds which are not contented with hedge buds in 
spring, but must needs come into gardens. Gulls cannot be well 
tamer than I have seen them at a fashionable sea-coast watering 
place, where in less than a month everybody would be free to 
shoot them. 
That the St. Kilda wren “ no longer exists ” seems rather a 
bold statement to make. I have no recent data on the subject, 
but a correspondent of the Zoologist points out that the wren of 
St. Kilda, the existence of which was recorded as long ago as 
