156 PROTECTION OF BIRDS 



" The watcher we keep on Breydon Water is defied by 

 the gunners there who want to shoot Spoonbills now 

 frequenting it, and then a man is fined at Yarmouth for 

 having two blackbirds in his possession ! " * 



An effort was made to remove the protection from 

 the colony of Terns at Aldeburgh on the ground that 

 they were responsible for the falling- off of the inshore 

 fisheries. 



September 10, 1906. 



My dear Tuck, 



I am glad to see by a newspaper paragraph that 

 you are taking up the question of the Terns at Aldeburgh 

 (or Orford) Beach, for it is high time that somebody who 

 knows something about birds and their ways should do 

 so. I am too old to fight, and, moreover, I have not the 

 necessary local knowledge. I have not been there since 

 June, 1885. I am quite sure that there were not 40 pairs 

 of Terns on the whole beach, and it is quite absurd for 

 any one to assert (as I read) that there are now 40,000 

 birds. 



That the inshore fisheries have been " fished out " has 

 long been notorious. I made a point of it in an Address 

 I gave to the British Association at the Glasgow meeting 

 just 30 years ago, and in consequence my good friend 

 Holdsworth (who had been Secretary to Huxley's Herring 

 Fishery Commission) fell foul of me and we had a lively 

 time in Nature. It is the greatest nonsense that can 

 be to put down the falling-off to birds of any kind. In 

 the days when sea-birds of all sorts were ever so much 

 more numerous round our coasts than they have been 

 for the last 50 years, there were plenty of fish. 



What I want to know, and should be grateful to you 

 if you could tell me, is the real cause of the present dis- 

 satisfaction. Are the fishermen honestly but ignorantly 

 of opinion that the Terns have so multiplied as to become 

 injurious, or have they been " put up to " this ? If so, 

 by whom ? When I was last there the Aldeburgh men, 



* A.N. to J. A. Harvie- Brown, June 22, 1900. 



