Excerpt from Our Country's Birds, and How to Know Them: A Guide to All the Birds of Great Britain Of this miscellaneous troop of residents and visitors, regular and irregular, there are nearly four hundred but among the visitors are a large sprinkling of casuals, included on very doubtful pretences. Englishmen are often accused of a desire to paint the world red the average British ornithologist would apparently like to paint all the birds red, provided his name appeared on the label. Really one shudders at the audacity with which the Flamingo, for instance, is claimed as British, although there is an excuse for so claiming him; but when we find Bulwer's Petrel duly naturalised on the strength of a solitary specimen found floating dead in a Yorkshire river, we feel that we are quite near enough to the unreasonable. There are at least a hundred and fifty species gathered under the home flag, owing to their having been killed in this country in much the same way as if we were to shoot the Chinese Ambassador and claim him as British because he died on British ground. But would he have come in a wild state? Perhaps not but neither did all the birds that figure in the. British list. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.