Absent Friends Of all birds, hardly excepting swallow and house
marten, none is fonder of a home or more faithful to one home than the stork, which unfortunately does not like the journey across the North Sea. I hid hoped this summer to see a pair which had nested year after year on a great house in Denmark ; but, alas, they failed to appear. They failed to appear also on many another Danish house ; and it is feared that the race is seriously dwindling. Now the route of storks on migration has been more precisely marked than any bird's ; and it is known that nothing has happened to diminish the numbers or discourage the birds at the western or nesting and of their long flights, and one theory—a very strange theory—is that they have been killed by eating poisoned locusts in the east. We arc discovering in this country that the range of poisons is difficult to limit. It is certain, for example, that bees have been killed in quantity by the spraying of fruit trees ; and I have known of the severe, but not quite mortal, poisoning of children by the too late spraying of gooseberries. " They love not poison who do poison need," as Lake dwellers have lately discovered in the campaign for poisoning foxes. Dogs, too, have been killed. Whether there is any ground for the belief that storks cat poisoned locusts I have no idea ; but there is no doubt among beekeepers in Cambridgeshire that their swarms are threatened with extinction by the growing practice of spraying fruit trees in blossom time.
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