ai4 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



in their churchyard. A very few years ago I had been 

 told that the goldfinch had almost ceased to exist 

 in Dorset. He replied that it was true, that gold- 

 finches had begun to increase only during the last 

 three or four years since they had been protected 

 by law all the year round. 



He could not have given me more agreeable news. 

 I remembered with a keen sense of satisfaction that 

 the late Mr. Mansel Pleydell-Bouverie, of What- 

 combe in Dorset, had written to me asking my advice 

 in drawing up a new bird-protection order for the 

 county, and that in replying I had strongly urged 

 him to secure the fullest protection the law can afford 

 to this most charming and most persecuted of all 

 small birds. 



Two or three years before that date I spent several 

 weeks in Somerset, walking a good deal, without 

 once seeing or hearing a goldfinch, yet if I had come 

 within fifty yards of a copse or orchard inhabited 

 by a pair, their sharp, unmistakable whit-whit would 

 have advertised their presence. At Wells I made the 

 acquaintance of a man past middle age who had taken 

 to bird-catching as a boy and still followed that 

 fascinating vocation. "Have you never had gold- 

 finches in these parts?" I asked him; to which he 

 replied that he remembered the time when they were 

 abundant, but for the last thirty years or longer 

 they had been steadily decreasing and were now 

 practically gone. They had gone because they were 

 too much sought after; then he added: "I daresay 

 they would come again if there was a law made to 



