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Updated: June 17, 2025
'I entirely forgot the right honourable, and marched into the dining-room to tell Aunt Catharine that I have killed a rose-coloured pastor. 'Killed what? 'A bird, hardly ever seen in England. I spied him in the fir-wood, went to Warren for a gun, brought him down, and walked on to the House Beautiful, where Miss Faithfull was enchanted. She will copy him, and send him to the bird-stuffer.
This bird is now in Mr. Maxwell's collection, where I saw it on the 27th of June. It was first reported to me by Mr. Jago, the bird-stuffer in Guernsey. These are the only two Channel Island specimens of the Hen Harrier which I have been able to find. I have never shot it myself or seen it alive. It is, however, included in Professor Ansted's list, but marked as occurring in Guernsey only.
There were also two young birds in the bird-stuffer and carpenter's shop at Alderney, both of which had been killed in that Island shortly before my last visit, June, 1878. As mistakes may occasionally arise in identifying specimens, especially in immature plumage, it may be as well to notice a distinction between the Hen Harrier and Montagu's Harrier, which has been pointed out by Mr.
Rodd records the capture of one, a female, near the Lizard, in Cornwall, late in April of the same year. When at Alderney this summer I was told that a Heron of some sort, but certainly not a Common Heron, had been shot in that Island about six weeks before my visit on the 27th of June. Accordingly I went the next morning to the bird-stuffer, Mr.
I have one in my possession shot at Bordeaux harbour on the 14th of November, 1871, and I saw one in the flesh at Mr. Couch's, the bird-stuffer, which had been shot at Alderney on the 2nd of November in the same year; and Mr. MacCulloch writes to me that one was wounded and taken alive in the parish of the Forest in Guernsey in 1845.
It is not only sheer waste, but I have to reckon with the ideas of the bird-stuffer, while, if I have the skin and nobody has interfered with it, I can form my own judgment as to what the bird was like. For ornithological purposes, what is needed is not glass cases full of stuffed birds on perches, but convenient drawers into each of which a great quantity of skins will go.
The Dotterel is included in Professor Ansted's list, and by him marked as having occurred in Guernsey and Sark. I should think Alderney a more likely place for the bird to have occurred than Sark, but I have not been able to gain any information about its occurrence there; neither the carpenter bird-stuffer nor his sporting friend had a skin or any part of the bird.
The Mundurucú warrior, when he had killed an enemy, cut off his head with a broad bamboo knife and proceeded to preserve it thus: First he soaked it for a time in some non-oxidizable vegetable oil; then he extracted the bone and the bulk of the muscles somewhat as a bird-stuffer extracts the body from the skin. He then filled up the cavity with hot pebbles and hung the preparation up to dry.
The other fortunately escaped. The bird which was killed is now in my possession, and is a fully adult Iceland Falcon, and Mr. Couch, the bird-stuffer who skinned it, informed me a male by dissection.
The Quail breeds occasionally, too, in Alderney, as the bird-stuffer and carpenter had some Quail's and Landrail's eggs; these he told me he had taken out of the same nest which he supposed belonged originally to the Landrail, as there were rather more Landrail's than Quail's eggs in it. Professor Ansted includes the Quail in his list, but marks it as occurring only in Guernsey.
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