64 SAINT KILDA AND HER WREN 



their jackals are suggested by recent proceedings in a 

 well-known auction room in Covent Garden (1903), when 

 a number of rare British-laid eggs were offered for sale. 

 The Society for the Protection of Birds exercised its usual 

 praiseworthy vigilance. The secretary wrote, warning the 

 auctioneer that certain lots had been obtained in con- 

 travention of the Wild Birds Preservation Acts, and could 

 not legally be exposed for sale. Consequently these lots 

 were withdrawn ; but the mischief had been done. The 

 contraband eggs had been well advertised, and no doubt 

 found their way, at exorbitant prices, into the cabinets of 

 unscrupulous amateurs. 



Among those publicly sold were some of the stockdove, 

 specially commended as having been ' laid by the last 

 pair breeding at Portland.' Of the Cornish chough, a 

 beautiful and steadily disappearing bird, five eggs were 

 offered from the coast of Antrim, and four of the red- 

 necked phalarope from North Ronaldshay. Melancholy 

 and exasperating though it be that these lonely shores 

 should be ransacked annually by Cockney collectors, 

 worse remains to be told. Among all species of British 

 birds, two only are reckoned as exclusively endemic 

 to be found nowhere else in the world. One of these is 

 the red grouse, about whose future there need be no 

 apprehension. The other is a wren, differing from the 

 brown wren of English hedgerows chiefly in the structure 

 and dimensions of its legs and feet, which have developed 

 certain peculiarities from long isolation in the rocky soli- 

 tude of St. Kilda, where only it is to be found. It is 

 doubtful whether Mr. Seebohm was justified in assigning 

 specific rank to this little bird, as he did in 1884 under 

 the title Troglodytes hirtensis, in allusion to Hirta, the 



