Bird Notes & News 



ISSUED QUARTERLY BY THE ROYAL SOCIETY 

 FOR THE PROTECTION OF BIRDS 



Vol. VIII. 



SUMMER. 1919. 



[No. 6. 



Reconstruction. 



Among the many schemes for post-war 

 reconstruction it must not be forgotten that 

 nowhere is reconstruction more urgently called 

 for than in the matter of Bird Protection. 

 Reform was in the air long before the war. 

 It had reached the point of a Departmental 

 Committee for the preservation of British 

 birds, and a Government Bill for the salvation 

 of finely-plumaged birds of all nations. The 

 war stopped both projects ; and the crying 

 need (in the latter case particularly) promises 

 to become a scandal. Upon bird-lovers falls 

 the task of demanding that neither movement 

 shall be neglected or evaded or played with 

 any longer ; but resolute and strenuous action 

 on the part of all nature-students, ornithologists, 

 field-naturalists, sportsmen, and humanitarians, 

 working together in a common cause, is needed 

 to overcome existing apathy, indifference, and 

 hopelessness. 



For years anterior to 1914 it was known 

 that the existing Acts were to be unified, 

 involving more or less disintegration and recon- 

 struction. The Act that emerges will depend, 

 not upon this M.P. or that Society, but upon 

 the earnestness and determination of every 

 individual bird-lover in the Kingdom ; and 

 the sooner the resolution of each and all is 

 formed as to what shall and what shall not be 

 admitted in the new law the more ready they 

 will be to guide the opinions of their repre- 

 sentatives when the time comes. 



Certain defects in the present Acts stand-out 

 conspicuously. 



It is generally declared to be complicated 

 and unintelligible. A law which is to bind 

 educated and uneducated, adult and child, and 

 to be administered in the main by country 

 police and country justices, should be before 

 all things simple, clear, and definite. 



It is obviously incapable of preserving rare 

 species and their eggs. In the future there 

 must be no easy road for the collector to 

 record his examination " in the flesh " of every 



rare bird that tries to enter or breed in this 

 country ; for the egg-dealer to advertise 

 openly for clutches of eggs of rare and useful 

 birds ; for the bird-stuffer to cover the slaughter 

 of protected birds ; for the private collector 

 to boast the possession of protected eggs. 

 Possession must rank with taking as an 

 offence in the case of bird and egg alike. 



Again, the Acts have notoriously proved 

 insufficient to deal with the catching of birds 

 and their confinement in the vilest little boxes 

 ever invented for the imprisonment of wild 

 winged creatures. The new Act must leave 

 no possibility for the use of braced decoy-birds 

 or of bird-lime ; no possibiUty of the keeping 

 of Lark, Chaffinch, or Linnet in a cell seven 

 inches by four, or in perpetual darkness inside 

 the black cloth of the " fancier " who has a 

 bet or a prize to win at the public-house. It 

 must be no longer possible for the loafing bird- 

 catcher to sweep the country of its singing- 

 birds, or for London Stores, with crowds of 

 humane persons among their shareholders, 

 to receive for sale terrified Goldfinches which 

 have been sent over from Ireland in the hope 

 of thereby getting behind the law protecting 

 them in London. The unmeaning words 

 " recently taken," which have probably franked 

 more offences than the clause containing them 

 has convicted, must disappear, with all other 

 ambiguities ; and the concession made to land- 

 occupiers must cease to apply to the boy with 

 a trap in the backyard, and the Cockney 

 owner of a solitary pear-tree who bangs away 

 all Sunday at the Thrushes and Tits which his 

 neighbours have fed through the winter. 



Yet again, the Acts and Orders, in all their 

 combined wisdom and infinite variety, have 

 utterly failed to reach or affect the mind of the 

 ordinary agricultural worker and the country 

 child ; or even the country policeman. Hedge- 

 row-hunting, with pulling of nests, smashing 

 of eggs, and killing of nestlings proceeds as 

 merrily in thousands of villages as if no law 



