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of the charges commonly laid against them ; but with respect to the mole, and to 

 small birds in general, the truth, as in so many cases, lies in a mean between 

 extremes. Though it is true that the mole delights not in vegetable but in animal 

 food, his habits of life are often so troublesome to us, that we cannot wish his 

 family to be more numerous than it is ; and the same may be said of many small 

 birds, whose appetites, though often exercised on noxious caterpillars and other 

 foes to cultivation, are no less alive to the dainty food which our fruit trees and 

 other plants provide for them in our gardens. But it is of the wholesale destruc- 

 tion, chiefly of the larger birds, by gamekeepers, that lovers of natural history 

 have most reason to complain, and this, not only because there are fewer of them 

 to be seen and admired, but for the purely utilitarian reason that by improving 

 them from off the face of the earth, we have lost some of our best protectors 

 against rats and mice, those deadly enemies of our prosperity, both in house and 

 garden. I suppose that in most parts of our own county, the raven, if not alto- 

 gether extinct, is at least extremely rare ; the carrion crow, hawks, and owls of all 

 kinds are not common ; and even the beautiful kingfisher has become rare, I 

 believe, on our rivers. The cause of this sweeping extermination has been, in a 

 great measure, the antipathy of gamekeepers to all creatures which are believed, 

 rightly or wrongly, to interfere with other creatures, including fish, whose lives 

 are precious for the sake of their destruction at a later date in their existence. 

 Some time ago I came across a list of birds destroyed on this principle on one 

 estate in Scotland, between 1837 — 1840. i The numbers amounted to 60 eagles ; 

 1,758 hawks, kites, &c. ; 1,912 crows and ravens ; and 79 owls. Of course, as I 

 said before, it is possible to have too many birds of these kinds as well as of the 

 smaller, but it may be doubted whether the services of hawks and owls in destroy- 

 ing rats and mice, do not, at any rate in our own county, counter-balance the 

 mischief with which they are debited in destruction of game or fish ; whether 

 the kingffisher be not better worth preserving than almost any amount of fish such 

 as he devours, and whether it is not more pleasant sometimes and more instructive 

 to study the habits, to listen to the voices, and to watch the mo\'ements of some 

 of these wilder birds, than to consign them indiscriminately to destruction. 



Poor kingfisher ! his lot is indeed a hard one, for he is attacked both by his 

 friends and by his enemies ; by his friends for the sake of his brilliant plumage, so 

 splendid, says Waterton, that even the tropics " do not present us with an azure 

 more rich and lovely than that which adorns the back of this charming little bird," 

 an ornament which makes him precious to bird collectors ; and by his enemies, 

 who shoot him or rob his nest because he is a lover of fish. 



Something has been done by the law for the preservation of some birds, but 

 I read that there are still barbarians who manage to evade the law in respect of the 

 sea-birds, those chartered inhabitants of our rocky solitudes, rugged deserts 

 which they make populous with their close-lying multitudes, soft with their 

 downy plumage, and vocal with their shrill cries ; while for all human purposes 

 except that of decoration with their plundered feathers, they are absolutely worth- 



