BIRD PROTECTION. 143 



bribery will become more common than it is, and thus many naturally law- 

 abiding villagers will be constantly tempted to transgress. 



Far better have the collector shooting openly in September than his 

 gold working secretly against the law. 



What is really wanted is not any more general measures, but some 

 effective method of dealing with the man who massacres Terns (they are 

 in fact the only sea-birds foolish enough to allow themselves to be massacred) 

 from mere love of slaughter, and the man who kills them for the trade. 

 I would suggest that it should be made a penal offence to shoot more than 

 one pair of Terns of the same species on the same day, and that it should 

 be a penal offence also to offer for sale the skins of any bird on the Britisli 

 list (whether imported from abroad or not) in a milliner's shop. If these 

 two laws were made, we should hear little on the subject of slaughtered 

 sea-birds. 



The important thing, to my mind, is that there should be scattered 

 about, here and there in our island, a few well-chosen bird sanctuaries, where 

 a gun is never fired, and where the birds can breed in peace. The Fame 

 Islands and Wicken Fen are cases in point. The New Forest might well 

 be made another, and if one or two Broads known as resorts of the Bearded 

 Tit, and perhaps some recognized haunt of the Dartford Warbler, were 

 added, there would be no need to meddle with any seaside places, which, 

 after all, are seldom more than temporary stopping-places for the birds. 



Finally, I think that County Councils should specially protect throughout 

 the year certain birds in real danger of extermination, and pace the game- 

 preserver, the first of these should be the birds of prey. They should 

 be authorized at the same time to grant licences to enable persons, who 

 could prove that they were collecting for a public museum, to secure a 

 single pair of any species that it required. 



It has been suggested that bird-photography should supersede all 

 bird-collecting, and the idea is attractive at first sight. I doubt, however, 

 whether this pursuit will ever satisfy many persons for any length of time. 

 In the first place, the results are hardly worth the trouble involved in 

 acquiring them. They are interesting in a way, no doubt, but put them 

 side by side with a drawing by Thorburn or Lodge, and they sink into 

 insignificance at once. Again, the great naturalist has been evolved 

 in most cases out of the boy-collector, and this is, in my opinion, the 

 natural order of things. A boy generally has some elements of sport in him, 

 but very seldom real artistic leanings. If you turn him on to the camera 

 at the start, he grows tired of it in a few months and his interest in natural 



