GREAT IMRD GATHERINGS 37 



lings in England when liicy congregate at their roost- 

 ing-placcs. They arc gone now, or are rapidly going. 

 Their destruction was proceeding when I left, hating 

 Ihe land of my birth and 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 representa- 

 tions 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 

 w^e 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, 



