J26 EXTERMINATION 



more recent Avriters refer it as Latham did to the Scolopacidse. Its 

 rediscovery, should it still survive, would therefore be of some 

 interest, and it is just possible that the localities for it are 

 erroneously given. 



From birds which have recently become altogether extinct we 

 naturally turn to those that have of late been exterminated in 

 certain countries though still surviving elsewhere. Several such 

 instances are furnished by the British Islands. First there is the 

 Crane which in Turner's time (1544) was described as breeding in 

 our fens. Then the Spoonbill, said by Sir Thomas Browne 

 (1688) to breed in Suifolk, as it formerly had done in Norfolk and 

 shewn by Mr. Harting {Zoologist, 1877, p. 425 ; 1886, p. 81 1) to have 

 anciently had breeding-stations in Sussex and in Middlesex. The 

 Capercally, we Icnow to have frequented the indigenous pine- 

 forests of Ireland and Scotland. In the former it had most likely 

 become extinct soon after 1760, and in the latter not much later. 

 Not a single specimen of the British stock of this bird is known 

 to exist in any museum, but the species has been successfully 

 introduced from Sweden into Scotland during the last forty years, 

 and is now certainly increasing in numbers. The Bustard, which 

 once tenanted the downs and open country of England from Dorset 

 to the East Riding of Yorkshire, vanished from Norfolk, its last 

 stronghold as a British Bird, in 1838. From other counties it had 

 before disappeared. It is worthy of note that three of the four 

 species just mentioned were protected to a certain degree by Acts 

 of Parliament, but these laws only gave immunity to their eggs 

 and none to the parent-birds during the breeding- season, thus 

 shewing how futile is protection to the former when compared with 

 the safety of the latter, since there are very many species Avhose 

 nests from time out of mind have been and are yearly pillaged 

 without any disastrous consequences arising from the practice.^ 



It would be impossible here to name the many Birds which, 

 once numerous in the British Islands, have now so much 

 diminished as to be rightly considered scarce, or to recount the 

 various causes to which their diminution is due. The persecution 

 of Birds-of-Prey seems to have begun Avith the keepers of poultrj', 

 to whom the Kite, and the Hen-HARRIER, Circus cyaneus, were a 

 sore trouble,^ but it has been actively followed up by game- 



^ The singular wisdom of tlie old command (Dent. xxii. 6) — the most ancient 

 "game-law" (using the term in its widest sense) in existence — has here a 

 curious exemplification. 



- Schaschek, a Bohemian who visited England about 1461, says he had 

 nowhere seen so many Kites as around London Bridge {Bibl. Lit. Ver. Stuttgart, 

 vii. p. 40). And the statement is confirmed by Belon, who in the later editions 

 of his Ohserxationes (book ii. chap, xxxvi. note) says that they were scarcely 

 more numerous in Cairo than in London, feeding on the garbage of the streets 



