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BIRDS IN LONDON
BY
W. H. HUDSON, F.Z.S.
ILLUSTRATED BY BRYAN HOOK, A. D. McCORMICK
AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS FROM NATURE BY R. B. LODGE
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1898
All rights reserved
PREFACE
The opening chapter contains, by way of introduction,all that need be said concerning theobject and scope of this work; it remains tosay here that, as my aim has been to furnish anaccount of the London wild bird life of to-day,there was little help to be had from the writingsof previous observers. These mostly deal withthe central parks, and are interesting now,mainly, as showing the changes that have takenplace. At the end of the volume a list will befound of the papers and books on the subjectwhich are known to me. This list will strikemany readers as an exceedingly meagre one,when it is remembered that London has alwaysbeen a home of ornithologists—that from thedays of Oliver Goldsmith, who wrote pleasantly- vi -of the Temple Gardens rookery, and of ThomasPennant and his friend Daines Barrington, therehave never been wanting observers of the wildbird life within our gates: The fact remainsthat, with the exception of a few incidentalpassages to be found in various ornithologicalworks, nothing was expressly written aboutthe birds of London until James Jennings’s‘Ornithologia’ saw the light a little over seventyyears ago. Jennings’s work was a poem,probably the worst ever written in the Englishlanguage; but as he inserted copious notes,fortunately in prose, embodying his own observationson the bird life of east and south-eastLondon, the book has a very considerableinterest for us to-day. Nothing more of importanceappeared until the late Shirley Hibberd’slively paper on ‘London Birds’ in 1865. Fromthat date onward the subject has attracted anincreased attention, and at present we have anumber of London or park naturalists, as theymight be called, who view the resident Londonspecies as adapted to an urban life, and whochronicle their observations in the ‘Field,’- vii -‘Nature,’ ‘Zoologist,’ ‘Nature Not