98 BIRDS. 



pose. It may, or may not, be cruel, but it has simply 

 nothing to do with the case. The business of bird-pro- 

 tection societies in this country is with our wild birds ; 

 and, but for the people who shoot them, the pheasant and 

 capercaillie would not be here. Even the partridge and 

 red-grouse, though indigenous, would, it is fair to assume, 

 have disappeared long since but for the preserver. 



One outcome of the modern movement in favour of 

 wild-bird protection has unquestionably been an enormous 

 Increase increase of late years in the literature of the 

 of books subject. It is difficult, indeed, to distinguish 

 on birds, j-j^g precise extent to which the movement has 

 evoked the literature, and that to w^hich the literature 

 has furthered the movement. It is, in fact, one of those 

 cases of continuous action and reaction. At any rate, the 

 books are a reality. The old errors began to lose ground. 

 Doubts arose as to the cuckoo sucking eggs in summer 

 to clear his voice, and changing in winter into a merlin ; 

 soon folks came to ridicule the notion of the wren hiber- 

 nating, the nightjar sucking cows' milk, the siskin build- 

 ing an invisible nest, the heron hatching her eggs, like 

 the flamingo of books, astraddle, and catching eels with 

 the aid of an attractive oil exuded from her foot. Com- 

 mon-sense began to ask how the race of nightingales 

 could be perpetuated if, as averred, the mother reared 

 only those (males) that gave promise of good voice. 

 The swallow was no longer believed to jjass the winter 

 at the bottom of frozen lakes, to know the healing pro- 

 perties of celandine, to have in its crop a magic stone 

 like the equally apocryphal jewel of the toad. Folks 

 were told that the skin of a dead kingfisher was an in- 

 fallible protection in a thunderstorm, but they grew so 

 matter-of-fact as to prefer the ordinary lightning-conductor. 

 One naturalist revealed the truth about the halcyon's 

 noisome nest ; another ridiculed the simple old faith in 

 its suspended body foretelling the quarter of the wind, 

 and suggested that any live bird j^erching in a tree-top 



