212 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



only when they force themselves upon his attention in their 

 ni>Tiads". To gain rabbits and rats, cockroaches and bugs, is no 

 consolation for losing reindeer and elk, beaver and pine-marten, 

 bustard and crane. Of course, no one dreams of proposing to rein- 

 state bears and wolvcs (fox-farms and the like being an entirely 

 different projx)sition); but no one can doubt the agricultural danger 

 involved in over-thinning the ranks of insectivorous birds and of 

 small carnivores that check the multiplication of small rodents. 



To continue to argue from the past to the present, the necessary 

 spread of cultivation and the breaking in of waste land long ago 

 involved many disappearances, like that of the Great Bustard 

 {Otis tarda) — once as common as a wolf and now as conspicuous 

 by its abst^-nce — or that of the quail [Coturnix coturnix), once as 

 conunon as now it is rare. It nests occasionally in Scotland, but 

 more frecjuently in Shetland, where the "reaper" is still unknown. 

 "There, after the manner of the old days, the scythe or the sickle 

 still mows the waving corn, and the quail reaps the benefit of such 

 jx'ace as a primitive cultivation gives." The immediate point is 

 whether what happened to the Bustard and the Quail is not now 

 hapjx'ning to the Corncrake and, perhaps, also to the Lapwing, best 

 of "farmer's friends". It is not merely that these birds do not 

 approve of reaping-machines: there is a reduction of rough corners 

 beside fields and of quiet places generally. Even when the hedge 

 has gone, the partridge often finds a suitable nesting-place in the 

 rough growth beside a road-side wall, and on the outer side as well 

 as on the inner! But even these residual strips are being reduced, 

 and in proportion as things become "spick and span" the birds 

 become scarcer. 



We do not counsel the impracticable, for cultivation must needs 

 become more extcnsiv^e and more intensive; but it is a practical 

 question whether there might not be more conservation of wild 

 corners as sanctuaries for beneficial animals. Yet again, in all these 

 balancings of pro and con we must be jealously fair, and while 

 there has been in some highly cultivated parts of the country a 

 diminution of the finer butterflies, for instance, that used to be 

 common — and this as the result of the cHminationof the caterpillar's 

 food-plants from hedges and fallow strips — the same will be true in 

 regard to many injurious insects. So the reduction of wild shelters 

 cuts both ways. 



But this all-round fairness is a httle apt to lead us to be too 

 optimistic; the ominous fact is that there has been a serious reduc- 

 tion of the native shelters for useful birds and beasts. Dr. Ritchie 

 puts it well: "With the breaking in of the wild banks and braes — 

 'the burnin' yellow's awa' that was aince alowe, on the braes o' 

 whin' — the nesting-sites for many small birds and the shelters for 

 many small rodents aLnd insectivores have disappeared, to the 



