POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY.*
NEW books about birds appear in rapid succession. Mr. Lodge's contribution to ornithology is primarily a picture- book, and his text is chiefly an account of the circumstances in which his photographs of the living birds and their nests were secured. His photographs are equal, if not superior, to any that we have seen. There is a great fashion nowadays among field naturalists to prefer the camera to the gun. It is a natural consequence that every amateur photo- grapher who has secured a number of photographs of birds or their nests thinks that he has material for a book, though he may have nothing to say. These criticisms 46 not apply to Mr. Lodge, for, though he is more of a photographer than an ornithologist, his photographs of bird life in Holland and in Spain are of unique interest. He begins by describing the best sort of photographic outfit for this kind of work, and a very ingenious device by which a bird automatically photographs itself, when it touches a silk thread which completes an electric circuit and releases the shutter. Mr. Lodge begins with bird life in the suburban parish of Enfield, where in the last ten years be has observed no less than ninety-one different species, and obtained many excellent photographs of a great number. The old elms are still standing by the New River where the last ravens nested in Middlesex; and there was a heronry within the memory of living man on the island at Bush Hill Park. But perhaps the greatest ornithological curiosities of this favoured parish are the ringed plovers which nested on the Enfield sewage farm in 1901. The succeeding chapters con- tain photographs and descriptions of bird life on a Lincoln- shire mud-flat, on the Fame Islands, and on the Norfolk Broads. The account which follows of an excursion to a Dutch marsh in the nesting season is full of interest. Here the spoonbill, the purple heron, the black tern, the avocet, and the great reed-warbler were found breeding, and a very re- markable set of photographs was obtained with infinite labour and patience. The succeeding chapter deals with bird life in the Spanish Marismas at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, which are perhaps the most delightful hunting-grounds for the ornithologist in the whole of Europe. We do not find • (1) Pictures of Bird Life : on Woodland, Meadow, Mountain, and Marsh. By R. B. Lodge. With numerous Colour and Halftone Illustrations from Photo- graphs from Life by the Author. London: S. H. Bousfield and Co. [27s.] —(2) Wild Nature s Ways. By R. Rearton, F.Z.S. With 200 Illustrations from Photographs taken direct from Nature by Cherry and Richard %carton. London : Cassell and Co. 1109. 6d.3—(3) Bird Life in Wild Wales. By J. A. Walpole-Bond. Illustrated with Photographs by Oliver G. Pike. London '1'. Fisher Unwin. [7e. 6d.]—(e) Nature s Riddles - or, The Battle of the Beasts. By H. W. Shepheard-Walwyn, P.Z.S., F.E.S. With Coloured Plate and over 100 Illustrations by she Author. London Cltesell and Co. [Cs.]— (5) Popular Natural History of the Lower Animals (Invertebrates). By Henry ScherrrAi, F.Z.S. With 168 Illustrations. London: E.T.S. [Ss. 6d.)— (6) Curiosities of Natural History. By Francis T. Buckland, M.A. A New Edition with numerous Illustrations by Harry B. Neilson. London : Methuen and Co. anything particularly new in Mr. Lodge's descriptions of the place ; but he travelled chiefly as a photographer, and was well rewarded. The flamingoes were abundant, and stood in long lines like regiments ; but Mr. Lodge was there in May, and no nests were then to be discovered. We believe that they do not breed until near the end of June. Spoonbills, avocets, and black terns were all nesting ; and among new birds Mr. Lodge was lucky in getting little egrets, stilts, whiskered terns, night-herons, buff-backed herons, bee-eaters, woodchats, and grey plovers to pose before his camera. After this amazing collection of rarities secured in one journey, a visit to Denmark and a week in Derbyshire, with which the hook ends, are by comparison dull.
Mr. Kearton's rather less imposing book is another of much the same kind. He was one of the pioneers among photo- graphers of living birds ; and one would imagine from his introduction that there were few observers of Nature until he " devoted his life to the task of interesting his fellow-men in a new and bloodless way of studying the wild life of the country- side." The best of his photographs are in every way as good as any of Mr. Lodge's, though the book as a whole is naturally of rather inferior interest, since it is confined to the British Islands. Birds, moths, frogs, flowers, spiders'-webs, and cater- pillars: nothing comes amiss to Mr. Kearton; and though one may sympathise with such enthusiasm and zeal, it must be confessed that some of the results are more interesting to the photographer himself than the readers of his book. Among very real triumphs, however, are photographs of a sparrow_ hawk building her nest, a stoat dragging off a dead rabbit, a water-rail, a grasshopper warbler, a great crested grebe, a bearded reedling, a curlew, and a redshank sitting on their nests. All these, and a great many others in the book, are admirable photographs, of which any one may be proud. Mr. Kearton writes with a good deal of perhaps pardonable vanity of "the patience and physical endurance" needed, the "danger and suffering of the most. acute character" which were endured to obtain them. For approaching the birds he has made great use of the skin of a bullock stretched upon a wooden frame, in which both the photographer and his camera can be concealed. And among similar ingenious contrivances, he has constructed a stuffed sheep and a wooden mask, made out of a hollow ash stub, in the first of which the apparatus, and in the second the
photographer, can be disguised to deceive the birds. The
Hebrides, the Norfolk Broads, Ansa Craig, the Saltee Islands, the Cumberland fells, are but a few of the places Mr. Kearton has visited in search of photographs. Those of our readers who have enjoyed his earlier works will find the illustrations of the present volume superior to any in his former books.
The hours of patient waiting, and the heart-breaking disap- pointments which were suffered before they could be obtained, may be some excuse for the rather egotistic tone in which the book is written.
Mr. Walpole-Bond is also a keen observer of birds, and describes excursions in Wales which he has made in com- pany with Mr. Pike, who is already well known as a photographer of birds. The rather small illustrations which be has contributed to accompany the author's text have neither the pretensions nor the excellence of those in either of the books noticed above. For the most part Mr. Pike has confined himself to nests, and not attempted the birds them- selves. The observations of the author are sometimes recorded in a diary written from day to day, sometimes as accounts of particular excursions. He prints a list of birds seen between March and July, 1902, which includes the respectable total of a hundred and eighteen species. Much the most interesting chapter in this pleasantly written little book deals with the kite in Wales. This fine bird, which was once so common, is now probably the rarest of all our resident species. Mr, Walpole-Bond thinks that they are now reduced to a miserable remnant of some four pairs and an odd bird, which endeavour with ill success to breed in a few chosen haunts in the Principality. We much fear that the measures now taken to preserve them from extermination by collectors are too late. What can one hope to do when these monsters are willing to pay seven guineas or more for a British kite's egg? Although Mr. Walpole-Bond had the pleasure of seeing six kites in the air together, attracted by a dead sheep, he is convinced that not one brood was hatched in Wales during
the nesting season of 1903. There is much else in the book that we should like to refer to if we had more space at our disposal. Is Mr. Walpole-Bond right in saying that a few _yellow or Ray's wagtails stay here through the winter P We suspect there is sometimes confusion with the grey wagtail.
Mr. Shepheard-Walwyn's little book is written in a popular style, apparently addressed to the young. "Nature's riddles" are various problems of zoology, and "the battle of the beasts" is another name for the struggle for existence. The protective colouring assumed by beasts and reptiles, the devices of birds in concealing their nests, the mimicry adopted by certain insects, and other kindred matters, are dealt with in turn. The book is written in the style of the village-hall natural history lecturer, with allusions to "Dame Nature" and a plentiful sprinkling of notes of exclamation. The author's humour is of that kind which calls a rabbit "one of the little brown-coated gentry." Each chapter is profusely illustrated with photographs of birds—most of them appar- ently from stuffed specimens—eggs, nests, insects, shells, and the like. It will no doubt appeal to the large class of readers who like their natural history made simple and diluted with humorous, if sometimes irrelevant, anecdotes.
Mr. Scherren has compiled a book which is avowedly addressed to the youthful naturalist, and is written with the object of interesting him in the lower or inverte- brate animals. To deal satisfactorily with so vast a subject in less than three hundred pages is beyond the powers of any writer, and we must not be too critical of this attempt to do the impossible. The book, however, as far as it goes, would be better if more regard had been paid to order and classification. Mollusea are treated before Arthropoda ; sometimes scientific and sometimes common names are used; there is little or no attempt to distinguish between sub-kingdoms, classes, and orders, with the result that all is hopeless confusion. However, the young naturalist will probably not discover this, and if he remembers a quarter of the contents of the book, he will have learnt something. A more competent writer might have given him a general survey of the lower animals, which would have been of real value should he wish to continue his studies.
Lastly, we may end with a mention only of a new edition of the late Frank Buckland's ever popular book, which first appeared so long ago as 1857. His style of writing is too well known to need description, and the subjects he wrote on ranged from his tame monkeys to fish and fishing ; from rats to toads and frogs ; from the cobra to the megalosaurus and iguanodon restored at the Crystal Palace.
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