Our Rarer Birds. By Charles Dixon. (Bentley and Son.)—It is
doubtless somewhat difficult to draw the line between our less common and our rarer birds. Mr. Dixon's ingenious title, at any rate, gives him great scope, of which he has not hesitated to avail himself. Such birds as the red-legged partridge, the quail, the golden plover, the common gull, and others too numerous to mention, are rarer birds in the easiest sense of the term only,— that is to say, locally. Still, this definition is for many people only too true, and no one can blame Mr. Dixon if he takes advantage of it to give us much that we want to know, and so much that is
good, too, about "our rarer birds." Of Mr. Dixon's special gifts for describing bird-life there is little need to speak. It is hard to
believe that we are not actually wandering with him over moun- tain, moor, and marsh. We only wish that he would take us more into his confidence and relate more incidents and scenes in bird- life. His best efforts in this direction are his studies of the golden eagle, the black grouse, the fulmar petrel, the terns, the gulls, and the gannet. The ringed guillemot Mr. Dixon does not dis- tinguish from the common guillemot. It is certainly difficult to determine its status ; its variety points to accidental causes, we should say. Is Pallas's sand grouse a real grouse ? Mr. Dixon raises one or two interesting questions in the disappearance of the chough, and in his chapter on "Nests and Eggs." The illustra- tions are by Mr. Whymper, a sufficient recommendation ; the "St. Kilda Wren" (the frontispiece) is a charming as well as an in- teresting sketch.
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