Ixviii. president's address. 



breeding Seals were met with, it may fairly be presumed that all the 

 young broods perished. The Walrus, too, which was met Avith in 

 the 16th century as low as the southern coast of Nova Scotia, and 

 in the last century was common in the Gulf of St. Laurence and 

 on the shores of Labrador, is now confined to a very limited area. 



The extirpation of birds is also a subject of great anxiety to the 

 naturalist. There is no doubt that many of our native birds are 

 rapidly disappearing, as Lord Lilford warns us in the National 

 Revieio of April. Not only Owls and Hawks are viewed with 

 detestation by the average game preserver, but Magpies and Jays, 

 which are neither so numerous as Rooks and Jackdaws, nor more 

 destructive to eggs and young birds. The Rook will beat a hedge- 

 row for eggs as carefully as a pointer for its game. With the 

 greatest care of my gamekeeper Shave, I am able to save a 

 few chance broods of Kestrels, Crows, and Magpies, and to 

 hear the croak of a pair of Ravens which I always fain hope will 

 breed within our precincts. There is no visible increase from year 

 to year, for death meets the survivors outside this asylum. 



Unless some restraint is imposed upon the destroyers of our sea- 

 birds our shores and cliffs will be entirely denuded. A correspon- 

 dent in Nature some little time ago spoke of a dealer having 

 boasted that 9,000 or 10,000 Gulls and other shore birds had passed 

 through his hands in one year, and that he had got 800 in one 

 batch from one person. In 1891 Lord Lilford called attention to 

 a scheme whereby a Birmingham Company prepared to take from 

 the Shetland Islands during the spring of that year no less than 

 20,000 eggs, including many beautiful and rare varieties. His 

 intervention was, I apprehend, the means of the abandonment of 

 the proposed expedition. 



Mr. Harting's " Handbook of British Birds " with records of our 

 rare visitants shows that the majority of them, especially those of 

 gaudy pluniage,as the Bee-eater, Roller, Hoopoe, Golden Oriole, &c., 

 for the most part met their deaths in one of the maritime counties, 

 killed before they had brought up their broods. A pair of Golden 

 Orioles bred in the New Forest last year and returned in safety to 



