THE FAERY YEAR 



and killed in Southern Europe during its travels. 

 Killing or catching a bird on its travels is monstrous. 

 It is returning, after months of absence, to the field, 

 copse, or garden where it lived last summer ; it may 

 be returning to meet and mate once more with its 

 companion of last summer and the summer before. 

 Or it is returning to the spot where it was born and 

 bred. The beautiful instinct of home, and that 

 sense of direction which we can only imagine, never 

 account for scientifically, direct it. 



There is nothing too sentimental, too figurative, 

 in saying that the finger of the Most High points 

 the long, hard way to these tiny travellers at great 

 altitudes. Nobody who has properly considered this 

 wonder could desire to strike down the wanderer 

 before it reached its goal. Killing or prisoning 

 a small bird on its travels is a very refinement of 

 cruelty. I remember reading a most pathetic de- 

 scription by an Oxfordshire or Gloucestershire 

 naturalist of how, as a collector, he had once, with a 

 catapult, broken the spindle leg of a willow wren. 

 The bird flew a short distance and burst into song 

 again. Then the collector, horrified, crept nearer 

 (he wrote that he " felt like a murderer "), and put 

 it out of its misery. He said that he never collected 

 any more. That willow wren was too much for 

 him. But trapping and destroying tired bird tra- 

 vellers is worse it is taking them at such a mean 

 disadvantage. 



