SHOOTING RARE BIRDS 157 



or, say, a dozen of them, were keen eggers for profit as 

 well as sport. May not these men, dissatisfied with the 

 order of the County Council prohibiting egging, be at the 

 bottom of it ? What the precise order was I know not : 

 if it was total prohibition my sympathies could be with 

 the men ; but if it simply laid down a close-time after 

 which no eggs were to be taken, it would be reasonable. 

 Yours very truly, 



ALFRED NEWTON. 



He objected strongly to the too common practice of 

 shooting rare birds, but he admitted that there were 

 cases, as, for instance, when it was impossible otherwise 

 to identify them, in which shooting might be justifiable. 



I am very glad to learn you are endeavouring to 

 obtain the strange bird you saw. I am generally very 

 much averse to the common practice of destroying 

 indiscriminately all foreign stragglers ; but this is just 

 one of the exceptional cases in which the death of a 

 victim will in all probability be a real advantage to 

 Ornithology, and I trust your efforts will be successful.* 



It is not quite easy to understand his attitude 

 towards shooting birds on the autumn migration. 



I think we cannot complain of people shooting birds 

 on the autumn migration, at that season stragglers may 

 as well fall to the gun as be lost at sea, which would 

 probably be their fate since they have got " out of their 

 know," to use a good East Anglian expression. Feilden 

 writes to me of very young partridges, " squeakers " we 

 used to call them, being spoken of as " doddermites." 

 I never heard of the word before, and do not know 

 whether it is given by Forby. f 



Probably he had in his mind only those stragglers 

 that stray far from their course, for at other times he 



* Letter to J. A. Harvie-Brown, April 4, 1867. 

 t A.N. to T. Southwell, September 16, 1902. 



