Lost British Birds . 
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O 
illustrated volumes. If any reader, possessing such a work, 
really wishes to know just how we stand in this matter, and 
does not mind sacrificing his book in the process of the 
inquiry, he may get the desired knowledge by adopting the 
following simple plan : 
To begin with, he will find that his work contains life- 
histories and coloured figures of about 400 species, possibly 
more—a large number, considering the smallness of the 
country and its climatic conditions. But alas! he must 
learn that our island is “ an inn for the wayfaring of birds ” ; 
that many of these species are nothing but stragglers and 
waifs, blown, some of them, hundreds, others thousands of 
miles out of their course ; and that they are in no true 
sense British birds, and are only called so because a few 
individuals have alighted to rest on our shores, just as a 
lost bird at sea alights on a ship. Let him then begin by 
tearing out all the plates of, and the letterpress relating to, 
these wanderers from the distant parts of Europe, from 
Africa, Asia and America—the great black woodpecker, 
cream-coloured courser, flamingo, yellow-billed cuckoo, and 
many more—about 150 in all. His work will have then 
lost much of its beauty; it will have an attenuated and 
rather sorry appearance; but it will require more rough 
handling yet. On going further into the matter he will 
find that about twenty of the remaining species are only 
occasional visitors: the great grey shrike, woodchat, golden 
oriole, wax-wing, Lapland bunting, rose-coloured pastor, 
hoopoe, roller, bee-eater, and so on to the end of the list— 
beautiful birds, large and small. These must be got rid of 
in the same summary way : one’s regret at losing them is all 
the keener for the knowledge that some of them are 
summer visitors that have tried to breed and colonize in 
our country and have not been allowed to do so. 
The weeding-out process has now brought us down to the 
species that are actually extinct, and to those whose extinc¬ 
tion is imminent—probably thirty in number. It is useless 
to keep any of these: some are lost, and the others are so 
reduced in numbers that it is well nigh impossible to get a 
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