248 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



catcher would trap his hundred or two hundred cock 

 nightingales on the birds' arrival. And this drain had 

 gone on for centuries; at all events we find that as far 

 back as Elizabethan times the nightingale was eagerly 

 sought after as a cage bird. Willughby, the "Father 

 of British Ornithology," in his account of the bird, gives 

 eight times as much space to the subject of its treatment 

 in a cage as to its habits in a state of nature. 



The cost to a species of caging is probably greater 

 in the case of the nightingale than of any other songster. 

 It is well known that if the bird is taken after it has 

 paired — that is, immediately after the appearance of the 

 females, a week or ten days later than the males — it 

 will quickly die of grief in captivity. Those taken be- 

 fore the females appear on the scene may live on to the 

 moulting time, which almost always proves fatal. 

 Scarcely one in ten survives the first year of captivity. 



We may congratulate ourselves that it is no longer 

 possible for nightingales to be taken in numbers in this 

 country, thanks to the legislation of the last fifteen years, 

 chiefly to Sir Herbert Maxwell's wise Act empowering 

 the local authorities to give additional protection to 

 wild bird and their eggs in counties and boroughs. It 

 has been a long fight to save our wild birds, and is far 

 from finished yet, seeing that the law is broken every 

 day; that bird-dealers and their supporters the bird- 

 fanciers, and their servants the bird-catchers, who take 

 the chief risk, are in league to defeat the law. Also 

 that very many country magistrates deal tenderly with 

 offenders so long as they respect "game." A partridge, 



