Abstract
THE latest book on the “Birds of Kent”—the third to appear in recent years—is entitled, very appropriately, a history of the birds of the county. For the author, who has been sixteen years preparing this work, has given especial attention to the present and past status of all those species the distribution of which within the county is not quite general, and of those which have become rarer or more common, or have begun or ceased to breed within what we may term historic times, that is, since Kentish birds were first noticed by the older writers; and he has most carefully worked out chronologically the histories of fading and vanished species, as, for instance, the chough, raven, harrier, buzzard, kite, avocet, c. In this connection we may, however, point out that too much importance must not be attached to the use of the word chough in Shakespeare's description of the cliff at Dover, “The Crows and Choughs that wing the midway air,” for there is evidence to show that the older writers must have often meant jackdaws when they wrote choughs. The name-chough, indeed, seems to have been originally as generic as pie; and just as they distinguished the mag-pie and the jay-pie, so in time they distinguished the less-known chough as the Cornish chough. Happily, this history is not obliged to confine itself to dealing with the decreases of all the more interesting species, but can detail the increases of some, and point out the gratifying fact of some kinds of xvild ducks and other birds breeding in increasing numbers. Of that little wader which has always been associated with the county—and may be called the county bird—viz. the Kentish plover, it is extremely satisfactory to read of the steady increase in the number of breeding pairs of late years. Here again we have an exhaustive and valuable article. Very interesting details, too, are given of the nesting of the golden oriole in four localities and in some of them for several years in succession. The present status of the Sandwich tern is set forth, and of the Dartford warbler (the third bird the name of which connects it with Kent) we learn with regret that it is now extinct in the county, its history therein being admirably drawn up. Exact information on these' points has been wanting hitherto.
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"A History of the Birds of Kent". By Norman F. Ticehurst . Pp. lvi + 568. (London: Witherby and Co., 1909.) Price 21s. net.
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Kentish Birds 1 . Nature 84, 241–242 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084241a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084241a0