THE WILD-FOWL AND SEA-FOWL OF GREAT BRITAIN: BY A SON OF THE MARSHES. Edited by J.A. Owen.

1895 1st edition. 8vo (146 x 231mm). Ppviii,326. B/w plates by Bryan Hook. Grey pictorial cloth, spine titled in gilt.

"My childhood and youth were spent on the foreshores and in the marsh-lands of North Kent, where I associated freely with the shore-shooters and the fishing-folk as one of themselves. At the same time some of the best standard works of that day were open to me through connections of my own. The sketches of character given are from the life. There was a quaintness and an originality about our marsh-land folks that I have never met with elsewhere. Although I no longer handle a gun - having exchanged it for a field-glass - I have never been out of touch with the old friends of my youth, and specimens of the birds have been sent to me fresh from the tide, and have lain before me as I wrote these chapers on wild-fowl and sea-fowl". Chapters include: The great and little bustards; The stone curlew or thick-knee; Plovers; The ruff and the reeve; Sandpipers and the sanderling; Great curlew and whimbrel; More waders; Woodcock and snipe; The common heron; The common and the little bittern; The white spoonbill; The rail family; Wild swans; Our wild geese; The sheld-duck; The common wild duck; The teal and garganey; The pintail duck and the shoveller; More of the wild duck family; The goosander and the pied smew; The wigeon and pochards; The guillemot, little auk, razor-bill, and puffin; Divers and grebes; Cormorants and gannet; The gull family. Denham Jordan wrote numerous books and articles under the pseudonym, "A Son of the Marshes". He was a house-painter by profession, was born in Milton Regis (Milton-next-Sittingbourne) in Kent and moved to Dorking when he was a teenager, living there for the rest of his life. The places mentioned in his books are always disguised, Longshore Drift (1898) was his only book where he used real place-names, and that by public demand.