Bird-life in London.

  • William Miller
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Bird-life in London. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Several times have I seen summer dawn on Loch Katrine ; and many a time should I like to see this lovely sight again. That lake, however, is at a distance; to see it I should have to travel far; but St. James’s lake is close at hand, in the very heart of London ; beside this lake, or around it, I walk every day, sometimes near summer’s dawn, sometimes so late at night, or in so thick a darkness, that I think it well to keep a sharp look out on the bridge, where the hero of a modern novel, who was fond of looking over the lake, was waylaid and almost murdered by an assassin. About other parts of London I might say much, but this single part in its very centre may well stand alone: in my view, it is quite worthy so to do. And if we went on to what is soon’ we are told, to be an integral part of London, I might tell how, one fine summer’s afternoon, in a remote part of Kew Gardens, I saw a fine young cuckoo perch on a branch near my head, followed and tended by two little foster-parents of hedge- warblers, who fussed about in apparent perplexity, at their large and hungry offspring, and seemed half-starved by their exertions ; and how I called the attention of two ladies sitting near, to a sight which, they said, they had never heard of, and might, I thought, never see again. To that I might add my yearly rambles in Richmond Park, to watch the first return of the spring migrants ; how that Sheen Common, now, it is hoped, to be preserved by the exertions of the Selborne Society, used to be the earliest place to find some of them; how that last year, I first heard, on April 16, what Wordsworth calls that “ thrice welcome darling of the spring,” the cuckoo, and how that this year, on April 8, 1 first saw one cuckoo flying from tree to tree, but not singing—if the voice may be so called—but that later the same day, I saw two cuckoos on the same tree, one speaking and the other silent. But the dwellers in royal Richmond, official Kew, and pleasant Petersham, now united in one well-governed borough, hardly like yet to allow themselves to be ranked as dwellers in London ; so I forbear. Enough has, however, been brought for- ward, I trust, to show that London is really a city to be proud of, and that enough in abundance to justify this may be found, if we will but look around for it. W. J. C. Miller. The Paragon, Richmond. [.Reprinted from Nature Notes for June, 1894.] John Bale & Sons, Printers, 87-89, Great Titchfield Street, London, W.