ECOLOGICAL 213 



grievous reduction of their kinds." We have dcHbcrately cited this 

 reference to rodents as well as insectivores, though the rodents are 

 the farmer's foes while the insectivores are his friends. Nature is 

 very fair-minded; she is not prejudiced in favour of farmers. 



Drainage Plus and Minus. — Another useful analogy may be 

 found in the results of drainage, ancient and modern. In old times 

 there were enormous tracts of Britain in the state of peat-bogs and 

 fens. Curlew and bittern, waterhens and snipe used to be at home 

 in what is now Belgravia, and the same may be said of many a 

 prosperous farm. As drainage became common and effective, vast 

 swamps were reclaimed for agriculture; and Britain lost its cranes 

 and bitterns — the latter now happily returning to breed in the 

 Norfolk Broads. This drainage had, of course, its plus side, for 

 thousands of acres of swamp became farm-land, and as drainage 

 meant a reduction of pools suitable for mosquito larvae and fresh- 

 water snails, there was a diminution of malaria or ague, once very 

 common in Britain, and of liver-rot in sheep, still abundant in places 

 where effective drainage is difficult. What happened in the past on 

 a large scale is now happening in many places on a small scale. 

 There is a reduction of ponds and pools, bogs and ditches, and while 

 this has its agricultural and sanitary value, there is no use trying to 

 ignore the tax to pay. 



Even on golf courses, which have their ecological aspect as 

 reservations for wild life, there is a persistent tendency to reduce the 

 "rough" and to dry up "the pleasant places of the wilderness" — 

 all with the result that many wild flowers, which once were common, 

 have now vanished, and that many birds, whose presence used to 

 console the bad golfer, have said farewell. The inevitable nemesis 

 comes, even to the well-entrenched golf club, when there are not 

 birds enough to check the multiplication of Daddy-longlegs and 

 Click-beetles, whose larvae, the "leather-jackets" and wire-worms, 

 are so hostile to the turf. So far as we know, it serves little purpose 

 to allow a pond-surrounding swampy nesting-ground of Black- 

 headed Gulls to become so dry that the birds abandon it; for one 

 of the immediate results is that the adjacent fields, formerly so free 

 from insect pests, thanks to the appetite of this useful species of 

 guU, are no longer exempted. We do not pretend that this has been 

 proved by a careful statistical correlation of the amount of swampy 

 ground and water-surface, the number of gulls in the guUery, and 

 the abundance of injurious insects in the surrounding fields — 

 inquiries that take time and have also to be corrected in relation to 

 weather, farming, and crops — but the observational impression is 

 as we have stated. 



Dr. Ritchie gives details of a very instructive history of Black- 

 headed Gulls. They came (i) in 1892 or 1893 to a heather-moss, 

 with peat and moisture underneath, on the southern slopes of the 



