I
TAKING STOCK OF THE BIRDS
HAVING begun, or first written, this book in one village, which was near London, I am now finishing, or re-writing, it in another in "the westest part of all the land," over three hundred miles from the first. Here I had to go over this ancient work of twenty-three years ago, which was also my first English bird book, to prepare it for a new edition; and after all necessary corrections, omissions and additions of fresh matter made in the foregoing parts, it seemed best to throw out the whole of the concluding portion, which dealt mainly with the question of bird-preservation as
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266 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE
it presented itself at that time and is now out of date, thanks to the legislation of recent years and to the growth in this country of the feeling or desire for birds during the last two or three decades. In place of this discarded matter I propose to give here the results of recent observations on the bird life of a Cornish village.
My residence in the Cornish Village (or villages) was during May and June, 1915, and again from October of the same year to June, 1916. These were months of ill-health, so that I was prevented from pursuing my customary outdoor rambling life; but, like that poor creature the barnyard fowl that can't use its wings, instinctively, or from old habit, I used my eyes in keeping a watch on the feathered (and flying) people about me.
The village, Lelant, is on the Hayle estuary, and to see the Atlantic one has but to walk past the grey old church at the end of the street, where the ground rises, to find oneself in a wilderness of towans, as the sand-hills are there called, clothed in their rough, grey-green marram grass and spreading on either hand round the bay of St. Ives. A beautiful sight, for the sea on a