DESTRUCTION FOR FOOD 139 



GEESE AND SOME LESSER BIRDS 



The reduction in numbers of the Grey Lag Goose has 

 already been referred to (p. 104), and I would only mention 

 here that the process of extermination is even now to be 

 seen in the north of Scotland, its last native breeding resort 

 in the British 'Isles. Here the native breeders are annually 

 reinforced by large numbers of immigrants, as many as 500 

 having been seen on the wing at once. But the value of the 

 bird as food, and the damage it causes to the crofters' crops, 

 have combined to reduce its numbers, for when the old 

 birds are moulting and the young are unable to fly, all take 

 readily to the sea and are then easily slain by fishermen, 

 sometimes organized in parties. As a result the number of 

 breeders is decreasing year after year. 



The highly specialized method of capturing Geese and 

 Ducks by a system of trap nets or decoys has also accounted 

 for great numbers of these birds. In the thirty-five years 

 following 1833, 95,836 wild fowl were taken from the decoy 

 of Ashby in Lincolnshire and in a single season in the 

 eighteenth century the decoys near Wainfleet captured 

 31,200 Ducks. The total slaughter caused by decoys and 

 by driving Ducks must have been prodigious before the 

 marshes were reduced by reclamation ; but fortunately these 

 deadly devices never gained foothold in Scotland. 



Small birds have been and are an easy prey and a 

 favourite food in many countries. To-day we deplore the 

 slaughter of small migrating birds in the European lands bor- 

 dering the Mediterranean Sea. Quails are netted by the 

 ten thousand when they land on the shores of Europe on 

 their spring migration from Africa in 1898, 270,000 were 

 sold in the Paris markets and Larks are killed by the 

 hundred thousand. The War has intensified the slaughter, 

 for in May 19 1 6 it was reported that the peasants of southern 

 Hungary, unable to buy meat at the prices ruling, were 

 killing song-birds, and that the woods were being rapidly 

 denuded of their bird population. Large numbers of lesser 

 birds, Larks, and even Thrushes and Blackbirds, still find 

 their way to Leadenhall market in London, and strings of 

 Starlings are said to be on sale daily in the market at Louth 

 and in other market towns ; but the trade in edible songsters 



