246 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



The destruction caused by the bird-catcher is not 

 nearly so serious now as it has been, even down to the 

 sixties of the last century, when a single London bird- 

 catcher would trap his hundred or two hundred cock 

 nightingales on the birds' arrival. And this drain had 

 gone on for centuries ; at all events we find that as 

 far back as Elizabethan times the nightingale was 

 eagerly sought after as a cage bird. Willughby, the 

 " Father of British Ornithology," in his account of the 

 bird, gives eight times as much space to the subject 

 of its treatment in a cage as to its habits in a state of 

 nature. 



The cost to a species of caging is probably greater 

 in the case of the nightingale than of any other songster. 

 It is well known that if the bird is taken after it has 

 paired — that is, immediately after the appearance of the 

 females, a week or ten days later than the males — it 

 will quickly die of grief in captivity. Those taken 

 before the females appear on the scene may live on to 

 the moulting time, which almost always proves fatal. 

 Scarcely one in ten survives the first year of captivity. 



We may congratulate ourselves that it is no longer 

 possible for nightingales to be taken in numbers in this 

 country, thanks to the legislation of the last fifteen 

 years, chiefly to Sir Herbert Maxwell's wise Act em- 

 powering the local authorities to give additional pro- 

 tection to wild birds and their eggs in counties and 

 boroughs. It has been a long fight to save our wild 

 birds, and is far from finished yet, seeing that the law 

 is broken every day ; that bird-dealers and their 



