Birds by Land and Sea 



The kestrel feeds principally on mice, and I will 

 not seek to extenuate its offences against the feathered 

 kind. From a close knowledge of this bird, how- 

 ever, I am convinced that, if the balance were struck, 

 its credit with the farmer would largely exceed its 

 debit to the game account. This is one of the birds 

 I always find nailed up in the gamekeeper's "museum." 

 I am far from blaming him : it is his livelihood. 

 Those whom I blame are men, presumably of edu- 

 cation, to whom one would have thought that appeals 

 to desist from the organized slaughter of fine native 

 birds would awaken something of the feeling which 

 made their forefathers proud to preserve them. 

 Falconry, after all, was a sport on natural lines, and 

 there was some show of dignity in associating one- 

 self with the falcon in the pursuit of its natural 

 quarry. But this woeful slaughter of the hawk kind 

 in the interest of meaner birds, which also are only 

 preserved for wholesale slaughter, savours too much 

 of the machine-gun for manly men, and too much of 

 the wholesale poulterer for gentlemen. Does it ever 

 enter the minds of such that the extermination of 

 any species and some have gone altogether is an 

 irreparable loss ? a link gone in a chain of life which 

 began ere man was, and a link whose living presence 

 may well be indispensable to men who, in a more 

 enlightened age, will demand account of it with scorn 

 from the present one? It is to me an appalling 

 thought that any age should have wiped out a living 

 species from creation for all time. An appeal to the 



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