2 
Lost British Birds. 
The statement is often made that the total disappearance 
of some species of birds, and the extreme rarity of others, 
once common in this country, is due to the draining of the 
marshes, an improved system of cultivation, and kindred 
causes; and there is no doubt that some aquatic birds that 
breed in communities would suffer greatly from the breaking 
up of their ancestral nesting-places. But when we look into 
the facts relating to the disappearance of the species noticed 
in this paper, we find that most of them were lost through 
the direct action of man. Fowlers, gamekeepers, collectors, 
cockney sportsmen, and louts with guns, pursued them to the 
death, even as they are now pursuing all our rarer species. 
We know that birds are exceedingly tenacious of their 
breeding-places, and that when not too much persecuted, 
they rapidly adapt themselves to altered conditions. 
In remote, savage and scarcely habitable regions of the 
earth, the white egrets have been almost exterminated by 
feather-hunters, to provide suitable ornaments for the ladies 
of Baris and London. On the other hand, close to our 
shores, in Holland—a populous and highly-cultivated coun¬ 
try—the large white stork is abundant, and so fearless of 
man, that it builds its nests and rears its young on the 
roofs of houses. But we need not go so far as Holland, nor 
indeed out of London, for evidence of the fact that birds will 
thrive in conditions apparently most unsuited to them so 
long as man refrains from their persecution. To rooks, 
magpies, moor-hens, dabchicks, and shy wood-pigeons, all at 
once grown strangely tame and breeding in parks and 
squares and gardens, may now be added troops of gulls of 
three species that spend the winter on our ornamental 
waters, and grow familiar with the human form. 
To come now to the question which most nearly concerns 
us—namely, what do our losses in bird life really amount to, 
or, in other words, what proportion does this list of thirteen 
bear to the whole number of British species ? 
The number of the lost may not seem large to those who 
are not ornithologists, and who have on their shelves a costly 
work on “ British Birds,” in, say, six or eight splendidly 
