Mr. Dillwyn has carried through the House of Commons his
very useful Wild Birds' Protection Law Amendment Bill, which repeals and incorporates in itself the previous Seabirds and Wild Birds Acts, and extends protection during the breeding- time to all wild birds, so that birdcatchers can no longer de- populate the rural districts of nightingales, under the plea that they are " only" catching chaffinches,—which chaffinches, by the way, they often brutally blind, in order to render their song the livelier. The measure is none the worse that it leaves owners and occupiers to kill the birds on their own land, if they will. The truth is that the former enactments never could be enforced as against owners and occupiers, and it was idle to attempt, with such machinery as the law has at its disposal, to control their action, however foolish, in matters which they thought of vital importance to their own interests. But the present Bill, by including all birds within its scope,--and we trust the House of Lords will strike out the discretion accorded to the Home Secretary to exempt some birds altogether from its operation, for such exemptions would really deprive the Bill of all efficacy, —will prevent birdcatchers from rooting out, as they have recently done, some of our prettiest wild birds almost completely from the metropolitan counties, and so depriving the country of some of its best and most innocent pleasures.
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