PREFACE.
THE publication of this work is an attempt to meet what
has, I believe, been a long-felt want, similar works
having met with acceptance in most other counties.
Students of Nature have ever been fully alive to the
importance of works describing the Fauna of Counties or
other local areas. From such works, the larger general
histories of particular countries and regions are built up.
Ornithologists, especially, have been very active in publishing
local works of this kind. There are now very few of the
larger and more important English counties in which some
attempt has not been made by a local observer to describe in
the form of a book the species of birds which have been
observed from time to time to frequent his own particular
district. Stevenson's Birds of Norfolk, Mitchell's Birds of
Lancashire, Clarke and Roebuck's Vertebrata of Yorkshire,
Babington's Birds of Suffolk, Harting's Birds of Middlesex,
Macpherson and Duckworth's Birds of Cumberland, Smith's
Birds of Somersetshire, and Mansell-Pleydell's Birds of Dor-
setshire, are a few good instances of the kind of work referred
to, while there are many more, equally worthy of mention,
and others are known to be in preparation. Hitherto, how-
ever, the birds of Essex have not found a chronicler. It is
to supply this omission that I have laboured.
My present work, for which I have been collecting in-
formation and materials for over fifteen years, will, I trust,
interest all lovers of Nature, and, in particular, all bird-
students, not only within our own county but also through-
out Great Britain.