IRISH GAME.
A parliamentary debate on the preservation of game in the South Irish Parliament was interesting in itself and produced a number of surprising statements about natural history. For instance, one speaker spoke of the snipe that were bred in the island but migrated to Egypt later in the year. Is there any sort of evidence for this theory ? There can be very little, though one of the problems not yet solved is the movement of several home-bred birds, especially snipe and woodcock. Some few game-preservers begin to wonder whether even their partridges, which are a par- ticularly stay-at-home species, do not move further off than was once thought likely. The doubt arises from the inex- plicable fact that a very small percentage of birds ringed as nestlings on a property are recovered on the property. On the other hand, scarcely any have been recovered from any considerable distance. The difficulty of discovering the ways of our home-bred snipe and woodcock is increased by the immense immigration from the North. Our home birds are at the best a mere handful by comparison. The most interesting detail in the Irish Bill is the decision to include the green plover among the game, for the purpose of pro- tecting a friend of the farmer.
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