Correspondence.



201



Dove ( C. Afro), and a pair of half-collared Turtle-doves

( T . semitorquatus ).—Yours faithfully,


B. Hamilton Scott.



THE SEASON OF 1918.


Dear Dr. Renshaw, —An article in Vol. IX, No. 8, dealing

with apparent dearth of birds in Great Britain, inclines me Ut express

an opinion on bird life in certain localities which I have visited

somewhere between October 1917 and 1918. Owing to circumstances

I have been prevented from getting where ordinary two-legged

individuals can go with ease ; in consequence, I can only conclude

that a good many of the accounts deploring the scarcity of a species

either arise from hearsay or from the fact that we are rather apt to

draw erroneous opinions from relying upon immediate impressions.

Circumstances are entirely responsible for these impressions, and

because we do not happen on a certain day to arrive at favourable

results, we are apt to forget that the next ten days, when we are else¬

where, a good number of incidents “ crop up ” which did not occur on

the particular day when we were exploring. Twenty-five years close

study of the variability in numbers of a species has led me to this

conclusion. Every little while we get winters of such severity that

a drastic pruning occurs, which obviously only affects those species

actually remaining in a locality. Even they flee before the severity

of the weather, and only a small proportion are caught napping—so

much so that by the end of the next breeding season no noticeable

difference exists. Three or four times in my lifetime only have we

had a winter which froze birds in the sides of the stacks and in the

shrubberies, and which played real havoc with Thrushes and certain

small but prolific species, and on each occasion they quite recovered

by the following autumn. Readers of Lorna Doonc may remember

that Jan Ridd (fictitiously of course) gives an account of a hard winter

such as I mean, but evidently Blackmore had experienced such

a time, and makes his character give a pretty graphic account of what

takes place among birds on such occasions.



