The 

 :. Hilda 

 Wren. 



BIRD NOTES 

 *nd NEWS. 



(fttrntlar fetter issued ^motocallrj brr tJtje 

 octets for tfje fjrotmion of giroa. 



CONTENTS. 



Hunting the Wren. Birds in Hats- 



Birds in Hats— Hon. Mrs. Boyle. 



Duchess of Portland. Mr. T. Southwell. 



Lord Medway. "Punch." 



The "Artificial" Canard Again. 

 Notes- 

 County Challenge Shields. 

 Competition Results. 

 The Police and the Acts. 

 Bird and Tree Day. 

 Tea, Coffee, and Birds. 

 In the Courts. 

 News from Branches. 

 Lectures. 



No. 4.] 



London, 3, Hanover Square, W. 



[DECEMBER, 1903. 



HUNTING THE WREN. 



UNTING the wren — a pastime now sup- 

 posed to be obliterated from the list of 

 popular amusements, not only survives 

 but flourishes ; only the venue and the 

 conditions of the game have changed. 

 In former days it was practised on one 

 winter's day in the year, in Ireland and 

 of Man, originating in some untraced 

 superstition, and perpetuated as a sport by the 

 young barbarians of the land. To-day it lasts 

 throughout the nesting season ; the motive is 

 greed ; the object not so much the killing of indi- 

 vidual birds, though that is not unknown, as the 

 taking of nests and eggs ; and the inevitable 

 result the ultimate extirpation of an entire race of 

 this harmless little songster. 



The small island of St. Kilda and its neigh- 

 bouring islets — masses of rock standing out in the 

 wild Atlantic, fifty miles from anywhere — have long 

 been known as the home of myriads of seabirds ; 

 fulmars and puffins, gannets and guillemots peo- 

 pling densely ledges and burrows wherever eggs 

 can be laid and young birds reared. And to this 

 multitude of wild life the inhabitants of St. Kilda, 

 struggling for existence on some four square miles 

 of inhospitable soil, formerly owed almost their 

 only means of support. The flesh and eggs of the 

 birds were to them for meat ; the fat supplied their 

 light ; the feathers and oil constituted their one 

 trade with the outer world. In consequence of 



these conditions a solitary exception was made of 

 the island when the Wild Birds Protection Act 

 of 1880 secured a close time for wild birds in all 

 other portions of the United Kingdom. 



The lack of small land-birds on this isolated and 

 treeless fragment of British territory is as striking 

 as is the abundance of its sea-fowl. One of the 

 latest visitors records the existence of rock-pipit, 

 twite, tree-sparrow, starling, and wheatear as 

 breeding species ; but the one true singing-bird 

 that has made an actual home of this rock is the 

 St. Kilda wren, and this little bird has clung so 

 closely to its island fastness that it has adapted 

 itself in a measure to its peculiar environment, and 

 has come to differ in some slight degree from its 

 relations on the mainland. It is the one special 

 and particular bird of St. Kilda. 



The presence of the wren at St. Kilda has 

 long been known ; but it was only in 1884 that 

 Mr. Charles Dixon, who found it then abundant, 

 noted its variations from the ordinary type. Its 

 peculiarities were much discussed by ornitho- 

 logists. It was discovered to be a little lighter 

 in colour than the common wren, more con- 

 spicuously barred, with stouter legs and thicker 

 bill, with eggs a trifle bigger, and nest made, per- 

 force, of slightly different material — characteristics 

 definite enough, it was generally decided, to mark a 

 local race, but not to constitute a species — scarcely 

 enough, in fact, to give any distinguishing feature 

 in the eyes of ordinary man. Such small pecu- 

 liarities, however, were enough to excite a feverish 



