DESTRUCTION OF KINGFISHERS, ETC. 253 



within the past twenty-four hours received a letter 

 from a friend, urging me to do all in my power to 

 help him in his endeavours to check the ruthless 

 slaughter of these birds, moor-hens and herons. 

 He has already ventilated the subject in one of 

 the sporting papers, and has met with some argu- 

 ment in opposition to his views. Now, my 

 friend is not only a devoted lover of birds, but 

 a more than ordinarily good fisherman, having 

 been born on the banks of one of the very best 

 little trout -streams in England, which belongs 

 to his family. What he maintains is perfectly 

 correct. Kingfishers do very little harm to a 

 trout-stream, their food consisting very largely of 

 sticklebacks, and for every small trout they devour, 

 they kill a score of small coarse fish, such as bleak, 

 dace, etc., fish which are far better out of a trout- 

 stream than in it. 



As regards the charges brought against the 

 moor-hen, of being detrimental to the interest 

 of a fishery, I believe them to be unfounded ; 

 they most certainly do not eat fish, nor do I 

 believe that they eat the spawn of fish. Were 

 they in the habit of so doing, they would con- 

 gregate in the vicinity of the spawning-beds ; 

 and this is precisely what they do not do, ever 

 preferring to frequent those deeper portions 

 of the stream in which the spawning-beds are 

 not situated. 



As regards herons, I fear they are terrible 

 thieves at certain times of the year, more es- 



