106 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE 



gulls while eating their dinners, and, strangest thing 

 of all, to feed them with the fragments ! 



And yet these very men who found so great a 

 pleasure in observing and feeding their white 

 visitors from the sea, and were exhilarated with the 

 novel experience of seeing wild nature face to face 

 at their own doors these thousands would have 

 stood by silent and consenting if the half-dozen 

 scoundrels with guns and fish hooks on lines had 

 been allowed to have their will and had slaughtered 

 and driven the birds from the river ! And this, in 

 fact, is precisely what happened at a distance from 

 London, where guns could be discharged without 

 danger to the public, in numberless bays and rivers 

 in which the birds sought refuge* They were simply 

 slaughtered wholesale in the most wanton manner ; 

 in Morecambe Bay a hundred and twelve gulls were 

 killed at one discharge, and no hand and no voice 

 was raised to interfere with the hideous sport* 

 Not because it was not shocking to the spectators, 

 but because it was " Sport/' 



Doubtless it will be said that this wholesale wanton 

 destruction of bird life, however painful it may be 

 to lovers of nature, however reprehensible from a 

 moral point of view, is sanctioned by law, and 

 cannot therefore be prevented* This is not quite so* 

 We see that the Wild Birds Protection Act is con- 

 tinually being broken with impunity, and where 



