COUNTRY LIFE
Expert Report
That birds are very little affected by air-raids, and that they " get used to anything which does not directly interfere with their move- ment," is the expert opinion of Mr. R. M. Lockley, whose observa- tions of bird-life on the island of Skokholm became famous before the war. Mr. Lockley, for obiious reasons, can no longer carry on those observations in Skokholm itself, but he sends me some interest- ing reflections on what we now know to have been the coldest January in England for more than a hundred years. They are surprising reflections. " The frost of early-194o seems to have affected bird populations even less," he says, " than the cold spells of 1917 and 1929." His reason, and it seems to me essentially sound, is that though birds may die in extremely bitter weather, " somehow the numbers are covered up in a short time." Most reported decreases, he believes, are local, and do not hold good for the whole country, and he declares that " even starlings, which in cold weather flock in myriads to West Wales, and perish in hundreds, do not show an appreciable diminution afterwards, except locally."
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