12 ON THE SEA-BIfiDS PRESEHVATIOX ACT, 



towns are continually annoyed by having their gardens entered 

 entirely against their wish, by boys and others seeking birds' 

 nests, but there seems to be no legal remedy for this. The only 

 way to protect birds successfully would be to make them, their 

 eggs, and young, belong to the person or his tenant on whose 

 ground they are, and to enable such owner or occupier to have 

 any one who takes either the one or the other punished, at any 

 rate if he chooses. Thus all trespassers looking for any kind of 

 eggs, and whatever comes in their way, might be stopped ; and 

 we might really do without game laws altogether; and be so 

 much the better in this respect, that each person might then 

 do what he liked with what ought in my opinion to belong to 

 him, but which in reality does not legally. 



All legislation should be on the plan that what is morally right 

 should be legally right, and vice versa. 



The laws respecting the time when our resident game may be 

 sold and taken do not seem to be very hard, as no one who wants 

 a bird is deprived from getting it during the greater portion of 

 the year, but still there is not so great a difference now-a-days 

 between the value of a Partridge and a Golden Plover, and the 

 eggs of each should equally belong to the persons on whose 

 grounds they are. There certainly is this difference, that the 

 Partridge remains where bred or near to it, the Plover, as soon 

 as he can fly, will change his ground, but so long as they have 

 their nests on a man's ground they should be his property. 



As I said before you can do no harm by shooting birds so long- 

 as they remain in flocks, and it seems very hard and quite unne- 

 cessary to legislate that birds, whose breeding places are .confined 

 to the extreme north, such species as the Grey Plover, Common 

 Godwit, Knot, Sanderling, Pigmy Curlew, Little Stint, Tem- 

 minck's Sandpiper, Spotted Redshank, Turnstone (Greenshank 

 and Whimbrel rarely breeding in Scotland), and others which 

 visit us on their migration northward so late as April and even 

 May may not be shot by the naturalist or sea-side gunner, in 

 order to secure specimens in the inter* -si in-; plumage many of 

 them put on at this season. No legislation will make these 



