BOYS AND BIRD'S-NESTING. r.r. TRIO EDITOR or THE .sriceraeort."1 SIR,—I
should feel very grateful if you could find space in the Spectator for a plea on behalf of the preservation of birds. I have been resident this spring in a Berkshire village. The amount of wanton destruction of bird life during the nesting season has appeared to me during the past few years to have increased, but never have I seen it carried on in such whole- sale manner as this year. Gangs of boys, armed with thick sticks, with which they beat the bushes and undergrowth in search of nests, rosin up and down the hedgerows and woods, apparently without hindrance. A neighbouring vicar told me that last week, in his absence, all the nests which he bad watched and protected in iris garden had been rifled • and destroyed, whilst in an adjoining town the boys boldly enter the private gardens of the residents and search the bushes at any hour of the day. In the surrounding woods there is the same tale to tell; it is almost impossible to find a nest that has not been robbed.
As it is avowedly the object of elementary education
to make the children discoutentod with that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them, it would be waste of ink to urge that school is the proper place to teach them such useless sentimentality as kindness to animals, though I am old-fashioned enough to consider the subject of more value from an educational point of view than most of their acquire- ments put together. It also appears to be equal waste of time to suggest that the police should enforce the law. Who over heard of the police—so excellent in other respects— treating this matter seriously P I even doubt whether one village boy in a hundred knows that it is illegal to take eggs. The only way in which this hooliganism—For it is nothing else—can be successfully dealt with is for private individuals who have caught boys in the act to take out a summons. One case in each district would be a sufficient deterrent.
It is not that I have no sympathy with bird's-nesting. I
am a keen bird's-nester myself. But these village boys break all the rules of the game. They pull out every nest they find and smash the eggs in situ. It is this wanton, useless waste that makes me so indignant. I do not think it would be any exaggeration to say that fifty per cent, of the birds that build in bushes and undergrowth have their nests destroyed in a populous district. Apart from the gratification that many of us derive from the presence of bird life, the material loss to the country in insectivorous birds must be enormous. The • wonder is that any thrushes and blackbirds survive. They certainly would not if the whole of England were as thickly populated es this district and the boys were equally enter- priaing. Can it be that "Nature study," which, I believe, is now taught in the elementary schools, has whetted their appetite and increased their powers of observation without developing in the least degree those feelings that are the test of a lover of Nature ? For the same attitude is observable with smaller children, who still gather flowers until they are weary of the business and then throw them away. The
butterfly is still mobbed with caps as vigorously as ever. Cannot something be done to inculcate in children the love of preservation rather than of destruction P
At the public schools a remarkable change in the attitude of boys has taken place in the last twenty years. There was a case not long ago at one of them where, in the knowledge of every boy in the school, a nightingale was allowed to hatch out its eggs within a stone's-throw of the buildings. And this is typical. My experience is that no public-school boys, though most of them search for nests, take eggs except for definite collections. 0 si sic °nines !—I am, Sir, &o., •
B. F. HALL.
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