HAWKS IN TOWN 



IT is common knowledge that in the recent period 

 bird-life has become greatly more abundant in 

 towns than used to be the case. In the main, 

 we are for the change indebted to suburbia. The 

 great extension during the second half of the nine- 

 teenth century of the kind of dwelling garden - 

 surrounded, with abundance of trees and shrubbery 

 to which the business man betakes himself has 

 provided safe harbourage for birds of many kinds, 

 where their only enemy is the prowling cat. In 

 these they have learnt the relatively great security 

 of town life, and to-day gardens in the very heart 

 of large cities have their bird population. It is 

 hardly too much to say that for a very considerable 

 number of bird species suburbia is a true 

 sanctuary, from which the bird-nesting boy and 

 the man with a gun are alike excluded. 



In one sense it is strange, though in another 

 perhaps it is not, that in these circumstances the 

 hawks have not come to town. It is one of the 

 most unfailing of the laws of Nature that when 

 a food supply becomes abundant the creatures 

 served by it correspondingly increase in numbers. 

 When there is a vole plague the owls of an 

 incredibly wide area find it out and flock to the 



