April, 1893. ORNITHOLOGY. 283 



the smaller hawks and falcons, and also owls, are far less numerous 

 than formerly. There are at present large districts in England 

 where you may wander all day without seeing a single bird of prey. 

 This has been brought about by the excessive rage for game-pre- 

 serving. As a class, gamekeepers, considering the great opportunities 

 at their disposal, are proverbially ignorant of Natural History, and 

 seem quite incapable or unwilling to discriminate, even from their 

 own narrow standpoint, between the good and the bad. The natural 

 result, therefore, of so much misplaced zeal has been an enormous 

 increase in wood-pigeons, sparrows, rats, and mice, which, now that 

 their natural enemies, the birds of prey and weasels, have been 

 destroyed, flourish and multiply unchecked, and yearly destroy great 

 quantities of valuable cereals and other farm and garden produce. 



So much has already been written in defence of the farmers' 

 best friends, the owls, that any further allusion to the subject would 

 only be hackneyed and out of place. We will only, therefore, 

 mention one fresh fact in proof of the value of the owl as a vermin- 

 destroyer. In the vole-plague districts of the south of Scotland, 

 which includes a wide area of hill-pasture in Teviot and Hawick, 

 Ettrick, Eskdalemuir, Yarrow, and Moffat, in 1892, 301 nests of the 

 short-eared owl {Asio accipitrinus) were actually found on those farms 

 from which specific information was obtained, and it is calculated 

 that this number may be reasonably doubled to include those not 

 seen. 



The result is 602 nests, with, say, seven young to each nest, 

 equal to 4,214 young birds on these farms. These owls have un- 

 doubtedly been attracted to the district from great distances by the 

 enormous supply of their natural food, and are induced to remain and 

 nest there, and the services rendered by them to the sheep farmers 

 cannot well be estimated. To give three instances alone, twenty-nine 

 dead voles were taken from the side of one nest, and the next day 

 twenty-seven from the same place. In another case, a shepherd 

 counted thirty-seven at a nest containing ten eggs. For some years 

 past the short-eared owls are known to have nested in small numbers 

 in the infected area, but in 1892, owing to the abundance of food, 

 they have mustered, remained, and bred in extraordinary numbers, 

 with the result that there has been a marked diminution of the voles 

 over much of the districts named. The mouse-eating kestrel has 

 also greatly increased since the commencement of the plague, and as 

 many as thirty have been seen at one time. The whole question has 

 been most ably treated by Mr. Peter Adair in a paper which appeared 

 in " The Annals of Scottish Natural History" for October, 1892. 



In the five chapters relating to the sparrow, the evidence for the 

 prosecution greatly outweighs that for the defence. It is clearly 

 shown that the depredations of this pest on fruit-tree buds, to fruit 

 farmers, florists, young crops of vegetables, and more especially to 

 corn in autumn, is enormous, and far in excess of any benefits con- 



