220 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [P. D. 4. 



of flocks as is necessary. In any case, the birds breed rapidly 

 under natural conditions when undisturbed by man. If birds 

 and game are below their normal numbers in any region they 

 will increase if 'protected from poachers, lawbreakers, cats and dogs, 

 under a law prescribing a long close season. If they do not, it is 

 a sure indication that adverse human influences are at work. 



Darwin said that if not one head of game were "shot during 

 the next twenty years" in England, and if at the same time 

 no vermin (natural enemies) were destroyed, there would in all 

 probability be less game than "at present," although hundreds 

 of thousands of game animals were then shot annually. But 

 Darwin spoke of a probability, not of a fact observed. He was 

 merely stating this probability to sustain one of his theories. 

 Even if such a thing might have been probable in England 

 the conditions there, under a system of game preserving by 

 the landowners, were absolutely different from the more natural 

 conditions obtaining here; and if recent articles in the press 

 can be relied on, it is a fact that since England has been re- 

 cruiting by wholesale for the war, — sportsmen, keepers and 

 poachers having gone to the front, — and since shooting has 

 been given up, the game in England and Scotland has in- 

 creased rather than diminished. But it must be borne in 

 mind that whereas the natural enemies of a species tend to 

 allow an increase in its numbers up to nearly the limit of its 

 food supply, they tend to decrease them after that limit is 

 reached, as the birds that first feel the effects of want, being 

 weak, are first caught and killed, while the well-nourished 

 birds survive. 



If nature is undisturbed, therefore, all the birds are reared 

 and maintained that the land will support, but when civilized 

 man steps in and disturbs the natural arrangement and bal- 

 ance, then, and perhaps then only, the natural enemies of birds 

 may become unduly destructive, and must be checked. 



NATURAL ENEMIES OPPOSE MAN'S ATTEMPTS TO SECURE 

 ABNORMAL INCREASE. 



"Whenever man, in poultry raising or gamekeeping, attempts 

 to produce, by excessive feeding and artificial means, more 

 birds to the acre than the land naturally will support, nature 



