Lost British Birds. 
T 5 
continued to breed, Stevenson says: “ Not a thought of the 
extermination of the species seems to have passed through 
their minds. Either they were entirely indifferent about 
the matter, or else they believed that since, as long as they 
could remember, there had always been bustards on their 
brecks, therefore, bustards there would always be.” 
YI. Black-tailed Godwit —Limosa melanura. This 
fine game bird, like the avocet that preceded it by a few 
years in that last sad migration, is an inhabitant of the 
waste and solitary fens and meres. As Bobert Mudie so 
well says, “ They give life to the places which men 
neglect; ” and it is most curious to note that all these 
waders and denizens of the sandy shore and marshy flats— 
plover, curlew, whimbrel, godwit, sandpiper, and stilt— 
which, as Mudie again says, “ are associated with wildness 
and infertility,” are of a loquacious disposition, with wild, 
clear, penetrating voices of such an indescribable quality, 
that he who hears them is exhilarated and lifted above 
