for Love of Science.



229



slaughter by the French and Italian peasantry, who capture them

in countless numbers during migration and eat them, even the tiny

Goldcrest not being allowed to escape.


To what does all this misplaced zeal tend ? We know that

the desire and aim of these reformers is to put an entire stop to

bird-keeping throughout the world. The mischief they have already

done is enormous : already most of the native birds of the United

States and Australia are so strictly protected that students of bird-

life in this country are only able to obtain them at an exorbitant

price. That the birds of New Zealand are protected is perhaps just

as well, inasmuch as some of them, ow T ing chiefly to the efforts of

the natives, had become extinct or w T ere becoming extremely scarce,

but to prevent a few thousand Australian, North American or

European birds being captured each year, and so hinder earnest

Nature-students from working out their life history and recording

many facts previously unknown to science, seems not only injurious

but futile. The capture of one in perhaps ten thousand individuals

ranging over enormous tracts of country, can make no appreciable

difference to the preservation of the species ; whereas it may make a

considerable difference to ornithological knowledge.


The well-known fact that one or two species have in the past

been so persecuted by farmers and others, either on account of the

depredations which they have committed upon crops, or because

they made excellent food, that they have been well-nigh exterminated,

does not justify the hindrance of scientific research by the wholesale

protection of every non-injurious native bird. In expressing these

opinions I can claim to be personally quite disinterested, inasmuch

as at my age it is highly improbable that I shall have an opportunity

to do much more for science.


And now the question arises as to whether the birds them¬

selves will benefit by wholesale stringent protection : in this country,

at any rate, the indiscriminate destruction of birds of prey and of

such vermin as stoats and wild cats, which formerly broke up bird

families to a considerable extent, added to total immunity from

man’s action, must necessarily result in constant inbreeding between

brothers and sisters, thus weakening the stock and producing a

tendency towards final extinction of species. Already we see one



