192 BIRD HAUNTS AND NATURE MEMORIES 



to our shame, from Manchester and other Lancashire 

 centres; these trains were filled not with ornithologists, 

 but with " sportsmen," who shot the trusting fowl when 

 they refused to leave their precious eggs or young. It 

 was butchery of the grossest kind, and the drain on 

 numbers was beyond all calculation, for the young 

 perished of hunger on the ledges. In many cases no 

 effort was made to gather the spoil; gull feathers were too 

 plentiful to make the labour profitable; the excuse of 

 commercialism could not be given; it was sheer brutality. 



" If this is not cruelty, what is it ?" was Newton's indig- 

 nant cry. " Can men blaze away hour after hour at these 

 wretched inoffensive birds and call it ' sport ' without 

 being morally the worse for it ? We thank God that we 

 are not as Spaniards are, who gloat over the brutalities 

 of a bull-fight. Why, here in a dozen places around our 

 own coasts we have annually an amount of agony inflicted 

 on thousands of our fellow-creatures to which the torture 

 of a dozen horses and bulls in a ring is as nothing."* 



The railway companies advertised the opportunities for 

 sport, and then the subtle trader stepped in and created a 

 fashion in gulls' feathers; the price went up, the dealers 

 were able to offer one shilling per kittiwake, so Cordeaux 

 states, and one man alone boasted that he had slain 

 4,000 adult birds in one season. Taking into considera- 

 tion the number of eggs which might have been laid and 

 hatched, the number of young which certainly must have 

 been starved in the nest, and the wounded birds which 

 escaped to slowly perish, it is probable that that single 

 butcher was responsible for a reduction in one year of at 

 least 10,000 birds. " Fair and innocent as the snowy 

 plumes may appear in a lady's hat," says Newton, " I 

 must tell the wearer the truth she bears the murderer's 

 brand on her forehead." 



* Wollaston, "Life of Alfred Newton," 1921. 



