GREAT BIRD GATHERINGS 37 



the Italian immigration that was blighting it, wishing 

 only that I could escape from all recollection of the 

 scenes I had witnessed — of the very land where I 

 first knew and loved birds. 



How amazing it seems that the chief destroyers 

 should be the South Europeans, the Latins, who are 

 supposed to be lovers of the beautiful and who are 

 undoubtedly the most religious of all people! They 

 have no symbol for the heavenly beings they worship 

 but a bird. Their religious canvases, illuminations, 

 and temples, inside and out, are covered with re- 

 presentations of ibises, cranes, pigeons, gulls, modified 

 so as to resemble human figures, and these stand for 

 angels and saints and the third person of the Trinity. 

 Yet all these people, from popes, cardinals, princes, 

 and nobles down to the meanest peasant on the land, 

 are eager to slay and devour every winged creature, 

 from noble crane and bustard even to the swallow 

 that builds in God's house and the minute cutty 

 wren and fairy-like firecrest — the originals of those 

 sacred emblematic figures before which they bow 

 in adoration! 



But it is not the Latins only that are concerned 

 in this dreadful business; our race too — a nobler race 

 as we try to think — at home, in North America, 

 Africa, and Australasia, have been only too diligently 

 occupied in exterminating. Let it not be forgotten 

 that down to 1868, the date of our first Wild Bird 

 Protection Act, the chief breeding-places of our sea 

 birds were invaded every year at holiday time by 

 train-loads and ship-loads of trippers with guns to 



