It was at a meeting of the Royal Society for
the Protection of Birds that the famous charge was first brought by Sir George Courthope ; and made good. A little owl was seen to kill the chicks, was seen to bring other little owls, who carried off the little corpses ; and subsequently little owls were seen to visit the corpses when they became infested with burying beetles. The facts, repeated in the following year, are beyond dispute. Personally I went to the fountain-head to get corroboration. The trouble, as it seems to me, is that all generalisations about birds are generalisations ; and birds are very individual beings. They have their eccentricities : sparrows in one place will eat crocuses, in another not ; and chaffinches, plum buds ; and woodpeckers, telegraph posts ; and bullfinches, forsythia buds ; and rooks, pheasant eggs ; and kestrels, finches; and herring gulls, thrushes; and moorhens, ducks eggs ; and tits, bees ; and domestic hens, mice. These illustrations all refer to special observations. It is almost a rule that when numbers greatly increase, feeding habits are enlarged. A learned Hungarian, M. Svetozar, proved this by a number of remarkable observations in regard to the rook, which is a beneficent bird, until such time as its numbers increase untowardly when it may become very like its cousin, the carrion crow. The general multiplication of gulls has persuaded even the dainty London-loving black-headed gull to harry birds' nests and eat eggs. The little owl is certainly excessively numerous in some counties and districts ; and one reason for its constant multiplication is that it is as much at home in a rabbit burrow as in a hollow tree or belfry. Ferreters bolt little owls one after another in some districts ! On a priori grounds it is a mistaken policy to add animals to a native fauna ; and it should not be done except under licence.
The point will be approved in New South Wales, where the isoth anniversary of the founding is being celebrated and history refurbished. What a sum of injury was done to the island continent in general by the introduction of foxes (taken over by fox-hunting zealots) as well as of rabbits. Even the red deer became vermin in the northern island of New Zealand.
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