CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



" Auceps quidquid agit nostri est farrago libelli." 



To TAKE up the cudgels on behalf of the amateur bird collector may 

 seem in these days a somewhat Quixotic enterprise. Time was when the 

 possession of a good collection of stuffed birds tended to distinguish a man 

 as a Naturalist; to-day he is more likely to find himself regarded as a 

 cold-blooded and heartless butcher, Books, periodicals, papers, and last, 

 but not least, those very ladies who adorn their bonnets with the stuffed effigies 

 of Terns or Bullfinches slaughtered in the breeding season all these combine 

 to abuse him ; and certainly, if words could effect it, the collector would soon 

 become as rare as, or rarer than, the Great Auk itself. Still the advertisement 

 of " Collector's guns," " Collector's handbooks," &c., with which one is daily 

 confronted, would seem to show that the genus as yet survives, and long 

 may it continue to do so! 



I have no desire to hold a brief for the type of man who buys his specimens 

 from a dealer, and confines his personal efforts to labelling and arranging 

 them in a cabinet. It goes without saying that this style of collecting does 

 infinite harm, inasmuch as it encourages the wholesale slaughter of rare birds, 

 to keep up the stock-in-trade of the so-called London " Naturalist." 



But the man who shoots, stuffs, and cases his birds himself stands, I think, 

 upon a very different footing. If he happens to be a butcher, it is certainly, 

 not because of his collecting proclivities ; in fact, he is usually contented with 

 one pair of any given species, if only because he has no room wherein to stow 

 away a larger number, and when he has once secured a couple, the remaining 

 members of the tribe may run the gauntlet of his ambush with impunity. 

 " Why can't he be content to use only his field-glasses ? " says some eminent 

 naturalist, who has possibly amassed a fine private collection in his youth, and 

 has now taken up the fashionable cry. For the very good reason that the 

 ordinary man, who is fond of birds, cannot spend the year in travelling from 

 place to place to look at them in their native haunts. He therefore perhaps 



B 



