Worst Casualties
Mr. Lockley's list of those birds which suffered most is also interesting, and again, I think, a little surprising. One would expect to find among them such fragile creatures as red-buntings, wood- larks, skylarks, meadow-pipits, wrens, robins, kingfishers, but hardly herons, wood-pigeons, or lap-wings. And though here again the decreases are largely reported as local, it is astonishing to find neither linnets nor finches among the worst sufferers. Among species gener- ally affected, Mr. Lockley holds long-tailed tits, gold-crests and Dart- ford warblers to have suffered very severely, and thinks that the bearded tit was almost exterminated. Birds, as we know, were iced up, claws and tails frozen to roosting perches, but still not with that severity reported by Gilbert White, who wrote how " rooks, attempting to fly, fell from the trees with their wings frozen together." Mr. Lockley, who is now on the mainland of West Wales, concludes by reporting that buzzards are very numerous there—due apparently to " the abundance of rabbits, which in turn is due to the rabbit-trap killing out all natural checks—weasels, stoats and polecats."
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