WILD ENGLAND OVERSEAS.
THE House of Representatives of the United States have passed a Bill for granting powers to the Commission of Fish and Fisheries to stock the woods and forests with
game and other birds, as they have supplied the lakes and streams with fish. The new Bill aims at using the organisation and officers of the Fish Commission to increase the number of wild birds useful to man, and of bringing up the winged population not only of woods and wastes, but of the cultivated land, to the maximum at which it can exist with advantage to public and private property. The duties of the Commission are to include " the propagation, distribution, transportation, introduction, and restoration in the different States of the Union of game birds and any other wild birds useful to man. For such purposes they may purchase, or cause to be captured, all such game or wild birds as they may require, subject only to the laws of the States in which they are engaged." In addition, they are to restore, when passible, such birds as have become extinct in special localities, and to introduce not only American but foreign birds to districts in which they may be welcome and useful. Experiments will show how far acclimatisation is needed; but practical people on this side of the Atlantic are beginning to have their doubts whether, in the case of large territories, the im- portation of new species should not be delayed until the most has been made of those already found in existence. On small islands, with a limited number of birds and beasts, such importations may be necessary ; but even in such a confined area as the British Islands they should only supplement preservation. For many years it should be the aim of the Commissioners to reconstruct the fauna of the different States as it existed fifty years ago. This, if thoroughly carried out, would in most cases be enough to please both naturalists and sportsmen, though there are still found ancient hunters, red and white, who, like Fenimore Cooper's hero, the Pathfinder, when forbidden bylaw to killdeer where he had hunted for half a century, resent bitterly any h ruitations of their old right of using the rifle or gun against deer or birds of any species or territory. The pheasant is the only imported bird which the Americans really need to acclimatise. They are most eager to do ao, the authorities in States separated by a thousand miles of distance being already in correspondence and agreement on this subject. England and New England are thoroughly in accord in setting a high value on the pheasant. Pheasants are the only game-birds living in woods which have both brilliant plumage and whose pursuit presents the difficulties which go to make up what the Anglo-Saxon calls "sport" There are many other game- birds of the woods,—tbe willow-grouse of Norway, and several American species, such as the hazelhen and ruffed grouse. But none are so gorgeous, and all, we believe with- out exception, fly up into trees when flushed, and do not show the swift and splendid flight of the pheasants.
Those who remember Mr. Punch's fancy railway map of Great Britain published in 1843, and will compare this with the real railway map of to-day, must forecast, with uncomfortable precision, the condition of our island a century hence. If the town or suburban England swallows up rural England in the same proportion as it has done, it is almost certain that the English fauna must, in part or entirely, disappear, in spite of all protection, just as only certain species can continue to exist in the London area, though enjoying the utmost benevolence from man. Properly speaking, we have only one purely British bird, the red grouse ; and that has the greatest chance of surviving of any, except the sparrow, because its food is furnished by a plant which grows naturally where no cultivation can produce crops or cereals, and on ground so bleak that even with the example of the occupation of the Hind Head heaths by villas, we cannot believe that the builder will invade the grouse-moors in this or the next generation. But it is not beyond the limits of the possible to look forward to a time when some wealthy Englishman might wish to reconstruct the wild life of Eng- land outside these shores, in some blessed region where our "unrivalled industries" do not get the better of Nature, and where life, if less intense, would be more serene. Or without the " one man " impulse, or seeking to reproduce the life of the late Sir George Grey on his island, it is not impossible that a wealthy congeries of the rich and leisured class might endeavour in the twenty-first century to reproduce and main- tain a likeness of rural and wild England, as itexists in the most favoured parts to-day, and make it a centre of rest and retire- ment, to be frequented for refreshment from the toils of the greater commerce or of public life. There is very little doubt that, given the world to choose from, such an attempt might succeed ; , and if the acceleration of the means of transacting business keeps pace with the facilities for accumulating wealth, so that greater gains are made in shorter periods, leaving rather longer intervals for leisure during active life, some such experiment is quite likely to be seen. Rural England of to-day being the chosen home of the very rich, there is every reason to think that if they could not in the future retain the amenities which it offers, they would remake it, so far as possible, elsewhere, reclothing the new land with Eng- lish trees, grasses, shrubs, and flowers, and repeopling its woods and fields with English birds and beasts. Climate would be the main, but not the sole, condition of success in such an enter- prise ; but distance, nationality, and present occupation would restrict immensely the limits within which the scheme would be possible. In the temperate regions of the New World, the United States will in a century hence have a thoroughly representative fauna and flora of their own. practically maintained by Act of Congress, if the new Bill is a success, and like all successes, is followed by expansion. Canada is too far north to reproduce a thoroughly British area; and though its political institutions are more English than those of most Colonies, its social life and agriculture are Transatlantic, if not American. We doubt the possibilities of reconstructing the features of an English county in Canada. New Zealand offers, in climate and situation, great opportunities for remaking old England. Most of our trees, and all our agriculture, flourish in the islands. So do most English birds, from the pheasant downwards. In addition, New Zealand is like a small continent by itself, and it is possible that even our migratory birds, whose coming and going are among the pleasant and expected natural marks of the coming of spring, or advent of winter, might be re-established there, and make for themselves times and seasons of coming and departure. The life of rural England could never be properly reconstructed unless we were able to fill the gardens and woods of the new country with some, at least, of our summer song birds, and to see on its marshes and coast the birds of the river and tideway which compose the greater part of the living objects on these attractive regions of fen and foreshore. The problem is so difficult that it might at first seem without solution. In England we have two main classes of birds which come and go from our island. One set, from the cuckoo to the swallows, flycatchers, and all the little warblers, fly south for the winter. They must have insect food, and they could not find enough among the frost and snow of our winter to keep them alive. Another set, among them the golden and grey plovers, and many other shore-fowl, ducks, snow buntings, and the like, come to us in the winter, and fly to the far North to breed.
To remake our English bird life elsewhere we should need a temperate climate like our own to reproduce its vegetation, a cold region for the birds which leave us in the spring to go north, and a hot region as winter quarters for our summer birds to retire to. Yet, in a measure, this could be reproduced by making some parte of New Zealand the centre, and leaving it to the birds (supposing that they could learn the way) to work out their own salvation, by keeping in touch, as we believe all migratory birds do, with temperature. The sub-tropical zone in the northern island would be the winter limit of many birds. They would also find migra- tion routes which are, to a very limited extent, used by existing species, though, as New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere, the birds must fly north to get warm, and south to reach the ice fringe and the frost. For the requirements of the warmth-seeking birds "existing arrangements " would suffice. Those of the New Zealand birds which did not care to face the winter could fly up to the Pacific Archipelago, viAl the Kermadee Islands, to New Caledonia, Fiji, and the Friendly Islands. This demands a flight of 700 miles, for New Zealand is singularly isolated; lent the flight of homing pigeons for 590 miles, from Lerwick to London in a day, shows that this is not impossible.
The Antarctic region does not offer equal accommodation for the birds that leave us to nest on the tundra of the far North. The ice-loving species might find enough and to spare of their peculiar conditions for summer happiness. But the
scattered islands between South New Zealand and the fringe of Antarctic ice have no tundra and little warmth in summer, and no such wealth of insects and fruits as the tundra offers. Some inveterate lovers of cold would probably migrate to the frozen South, just as the Southern right-whales used to migrate thence to the coasts of New Zealand to give birth to their calves. The others could make up their minds to stay at home ; for the birds, like plovers and stints, which can get a living in the winter of temperate lands, can surely do so in the summer. If the idea of such an experiment in trans- planting the species of Britain seems too fanciful, a more modest effort could be made nearer home, in a region where most of the British species are to be found, and whither others could be exported for settlement. The coast of the old Ionia, and certain of its islands, offer the climate and vegetation of another, and possibly an improved, England. The fertility of Devon or Sussex, a mixture of Dartmoor and the West of Ireland, and the greatet part of the birds and beasts, not only of England, but of temperate Europe, are there found. If in the fullness of time parts o this shore, or of the larger islands, are available for English purchase and settlement, the sentiment and surroundings of the Old Country could be reconstructed with greater ease and success than elsewhere in the Old World. Climate and country are suitable. Under the Turkish rule all social order is in a state of flux, and cultiva- tion itself is liable to shift or disappear. If not socially a tabula rasa, the social order would be found so insecurely based that matters could be Anglicised almost as rapidly as in a new country, though even existing feeling and custom among the peasants is not indifferent to outdoor life and the pleasures of the chase and the woods. Hares, wood- cock, snipe, and all the birds of the Cayistrian marsh still abound as they did in the days of Homer, and though the cranes are strange to English eyes, nearly all the legions of birds are of familiar species, only seen in most un- familiar numbers. The wild boar is common, but with this exception there is very little difference between the birds and beasts of Ionia and those of Great Britain, except that in the former they are found grouped in vast numbers on soil so various that it affords food and shelter to all at once. All our domestic animals seem to flourish if transported there; and if we ever do try to make a minor England elsewhere, it would be better placed on the Eastern Mediterranean than in the South Pacific.
Previous page
