198 BIRD LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



and intelligent observations from the pens of those who 

 twenty years ago regarded their mission as simply one of 

 slaughter. On all such rests the best hope of our rarer 

 species. If the magnates of the soil, like Lord Clifton, of 

 Cobham, would issue a general Order of Amnesty, if reeves 

 and bailiffs would observe, and if naturalists would use their 

 field-glasses in preference to guns, we might add fifty kinds 

 of birds to our common species, all of which should delight 

 many and harm no one. 



Flapper shooting (though I have shot flappers enough 

 myself) is a very doubtful legitimate sport, and it is im- 

 possible not to suspect it gives a neighbourhood a bad odour 

 in the minds of the survivors who return, at least for a time, 

 as salmon do, to their first nurseries, and would, if all were 

 promising, and there were no unpleasant memories, un- 

 doubtedly use them again. There are plenty of odd corners 

 in water meadows and by stream sides where ducks would 

 stay and breed, if the crow boy with his gun were suppressed, 

 and they found peace and a little shelter. Such shelter they 

 might well get from osier beds dotted down, or low waste 

 lands. These osiers are in themselves a profitable crop we 

 imported five thousand tons of them last year from our 

 sagacious neighbours across the Channel and they fetch 

 8 per ton, nearly three times as much as good potatoes, 

 and eight times as much as the roots the farmer cultivates 

 so carefully for his cattle. Moreover, though they grow best 

 by water, much water is not always essential to them. 



It may tempt some attention to this matter if I add 

 a recent letter of a correspondent in the Field. He writes : 

 " The osier has been cultivated here in Norfolk with great 

 convenience and profit for some dozen years. I once got 

 some shrubs from a well-known nursery, and when unpack- 

 ing these was struck with the extraordinary toughness of 

 the " withy " bands with which the bundle was girded. A 

 set was cut from the least bruised part of the band, and 

 stuck in between two of the plants it had enclosed. It took 



