The Scottish N'aturalist. 51 



the numbers of our birds, more especially of our smaller song 

 birds, either by cutting off their food supplies or by destroy- 

 ing their nesting grounds. Every ifield, marsh, or swamp that 

 is drained, lessens the supply of insect life on which a great 

 majority of small birds live; every piece of land that is reclaimed 

 from waste, robs the ground or low bush nesting birds of their 

 habitat. Every wood that is cut down, every gorse-patch that is 

 burned — in short, every advance of cultivation — drives before it 

 some species of birds. 



It was my fortune to revisit, after a lapse of ten years, a part of 

 the country where some of my earliest birds'-nesting exploits had 

 been carried out. "High-farming" had taken the place of a 

 more primitive agriculture ; the thick high hedges where red- 

 backed shrikes, bullfinches, linnets, and long -tailed tits were 

 wont to nest, were supplanted by neat trim-cut hedges three feet 

 high, and not thick enough to offer cover for the smallest of 

 birds. The deep ditches with high grass-grown banks, once the 

 haunt of wood-wren, lesser whitethroat, or whinchat, had dis- 

 appeared, and patches of gorse and heather, where redpole and 

 linnet once dwelt, had been burnt and stubbed out long ago. 

 These causes, which for the birds' sake we may deplore, we can- 

 not nor should v/e wish to prevent ; and even consolation is to 

 be found in that while one species of bird may be driven out, 

 another suited to the new condition may follow and take its 

 place. The richest arable lands are especially the resort of the 

 lark, who dispels the monotony with his "sweet jargoning." It 

 is rather with preventible causes that we have to deal; and to the 

 indiscriminate and utterly wanton birds'-nesting, for no intelli- 

 gent or intellectual aim or object, which goes on in every 

 parish in the country, a check must be applied. Here it is that 

 the authority of parents and schoolmasters should come into 

 force. It is in most cases due as much to ignoj'ance as to 

 wantonness or destructiveness, that the youthful birds'-nester 

 takes eggs for which he has no use — no idea of use, in fact; 

 they serve to gratify his instinct for finding and possessing 

 pretty objects, and then are strung on a string as an orna- 

 ment, or made cock-shies of as an amusing pastime. Had he 

 been taught anything of the importance of the nest and eggs to 

 the continuance of the parent birds; or had any facts of their 

 history, as of how birds differ from other animals, or how in a 

 sense a nest and eggs are as much a part of the mother as the 

 embryos of viviparous animals, — his nesting for pure wanton 



