SEA BIRDS AND CLIFF-CLIMBING IN YORKSHIRE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] hope your love of fair dealing will allow me to protest against a practice that is but too common. I mean that of informing the outside public where they can go and watch rare and shy birds in their purposely secluded haunts. Your great naturalists did not specify the particular village where such and such a bird might be found, only that it had been seen in Yorkshire or Cornwall. But in the Spectator of June 10th, a paper that is beloved by birds because it takes a kindly interest in them, Mr. Oxley Grabham is permitted to invite the tens of thousands of noisy and ignorant excursion- ists who go to the Yorkshire coast during the summer months to visit Bempton in order to gape at and disturb the sea birds who nest in that neighbourhood. Not one in ten thousand of those people know anything about us. They will only come and yell and disturb us and our wives while sitting, and the fools will be none the wiser. We do not object to the real naturalist who is quiet and understands us, but why should our hens (which, like your females, are uncertain, coy, and hard to please) be stared at while they are attending to their duties as mothers ? How would your women-folk like it if you invited a mob of rowdy trippers to watch them during their nesting-time ? I say nothing of our dread of guns and
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