Io OUR BIRD ALLIES. 
show of reason, that, although certain birds are un- 
doubtedly beneficial in some degree, we have allowed 
their numbers to increase beyond their natural 
bounds, owing to our wholesale destruction of hawks 
and other creatures appointed to prey upon them. 
Consequently, it is asserted, care for our own interests 
compels us to reduce their abundance to such an 
extent as may still enable them to perform their good 
work, and yet prevent them, on account of superfluity 
of numbers, from altering their position towards us, 
and becoming a curse intead of a blessing. 
This theory, however, like many others which in- 
volve interference with natural provisions, falls to the 
ground as soon as it is looked into. For have we 
not, by our own folly and that of our predecessors in 
the past, encouraged the increase of certain destruc- 
tive insects, and so created the need for more birds 
than Nature, if left to herself, would have found it 
necessary to provide? More than that, have we not 
persecuted the small birds as well as the large, thus not 
only neutralising the effect of our destruction of hawks, 
&c., but doing upon a greater scale that which Nature 
would have performed on a less? And is not this 
relentless persecution carried on to the present day ? 
How many birds, even of the obviously beneficial 
species, fall victims each year to the cockney “ sports- 
man” or to the village gunner, both of whom, merely 
for the love of slaughter, shoot every feathered 
creature which is unfortunate enough to cross their 
path? How many nests and eggs are destroyed 
every spring to assist in the formation of a collection 
