BRITISH BIRDS AND BIRD LOVERS. 177 



cliffs. Others, such as the snowy owl or Egyptian vulture, are 

 at the best of times very rare visitors, and only driven to us by 

 stress of weather. The eagles, buzzards, and almost all the 

 larger birds of prey are rapidly seeking the furthest corners of 

 the land. The chough is extinct, save in a few favoured 

 localities of the West. Game-preserving and modern agricul- 

 ture do not harmonise with their presence. The readiest way 

 of finding any of the raptores in the country is to seek the 

 nearest wood, and there snugly sheltered at the end of a dewy 

 "ride," across which pheasants strut and rabbits skip, and 

 where chequered gleams of sunshine rest upon the herbage, 

 stands the keeper's thatched cottage. On a gibbet over a row 

 of weasels and village cats which have taken to poaching 

 courses, dangles another series of criminals owls, hawks, mag- 

 pies, buzzards, &c., murdered by strychnine, or shot during the 

 keeper's rounds, and hung up for an example to their maraud- 

 ing brethren, and in order that their slayer may claim blood- 

 money of his employer. Many a lesson in ornithology may 

 be taken at such spots, as the icthyologist eagerly scans the 

 mackerel seines for the treasures drawn up in them from the 

 Devon seas after the hundreds of opaline mackerel have been 

 taken out, and the worthless trash, as the fishermen deem it, 

 flung aside. 



It is incredible how high farming will change the avifauna of 

 a district. A few years may indeed see a barren moorland 

 smiling with corn crops, but they will also banish or exter- 

 minate many species of birds. Thirty years ago a district in 

 Lincolnshire midway between the wolds and the sea-marshes 

 abounded with all the commoner birds. Jackdaws haunted the 

 church towers, owls hovered over the stacks, hawks sailed over 

 the hedgerows and startled magpies chattering underneath 

 them over some unhappy, soft-billed bird which had fallen into 

 their clutches. Suddenly steam-threshing machines, followed 

 in due time by steam-ploughs, came into vogue, new-fangled 



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