100 



BIRD NOTES AND NEWS. 



welcome there than the Shrike or Butcher Bird, 

 which is a quarrelsome bird, especially during the 

 breeding season. 



A strong, close hedge of whitethorn and wild 

 roses protects the grounds on the village side 

 from the children, who might want to come 

 a-birdnesting ; ingeniously contrived traps secure 

 marauding creatures, such as the martin, the fox, 

 and the wild cat. Under the large trees are close 

 bushes, in which nest such birds as the Hedge 

 Sparrow and the Spotted Flycatcher. 



A long hedge of wild roses again attracts birds 

 of the family of Warblers, and innumerable Tits 

 build low down in the bushes. Sparrows never 

 build so low ; they are too wary of marauding 

 creatures ; fifteen polecats alone were caught here 

 in the traps during the month of September. A 

 short young fir stem has a network of dead pine 

 twigs bound about its base, and here Wrens build ; 

 whilst dotted about under larger growth are what 

 would be wide spreading bushes — fifty of them — 

 which are, however, tied round as we tie a lettuce. 

 In these birds delight to build ; forty-seven out of 

 the fifty were inhabited. 



In an outbuilding I saw five thick pine stems 

 which had lately arrived from the Bohmer Wald, 

 each having Woodpecker's nests in them, the 

 cavities of the greater and lesser spotted species 

 rounded, that of Picus martins, the Great Black 

 Woodpecker, oval. These the Baron had procured 

 so as to offer these species exact copies, in those 

 he has made, of their own nests — care being taken 

 to make even the slight hacked-out ascent by the 

 birds in the wood before dipping down into the 

 cavity below. Such things may seem trifling to 

 the uninitiated; but they are of the highest import- 

 ance in attracting wild creatures. Baron von 

 Berlepsch considers that those species that nest 

 in holes are of all birds the most useful. 



Here and there are most ingeniously con- 

 structed feeding shelters so contrived that birds 

 are protected from the weather as they eat. Small 

 feeding boxes, also with sheltering covers, hang 

 from trees, and from the branches of high pines 

 are some on the principle of those poultry feeders 

 and drinking vessels which fill as they are emptied 

 by the birds ; over the feeding troughs there is a 

 metal bell-shaped cover. As I said before, suitable 

 and regular feeding for the various species in the 

 severe winters is of the highest importance. 



A NATURALIST IN FLORIDA.* 



The representatives of the plume trade display. an 

 ingenuity worthy of a better cause in the number 

 and variety of the arguments which they bring- 

 forward to meet the hesitation displayed by many 

 ladies when tempted by "osprey "-trimmed head- 

 gear. At one time we are told that egrets are 

 " farmed "for their plumes — somewhere ; at another, 

 that the feathers are moulted articles diligently 

 picked up on a breeding-ground — somewhere ; at 

 another, that the birds are killed for food by starving 

 natives, who sell the feathers to obtain a meagre 

 living ; at another, that the birds are a pest and must 

 be killed, and it does not matter, because there are 

 so many of them ; and yet once again, that no 

 birds are killed at all, that none could be found in 

 numbers large enough to supply the plume market, 

 and (whatever tales the plume auctions may tell) 

 that ospreys are made out of quills and whalebone. 

 Meanwhile, naturalists like Mr. W. E. Scott, 

 Mr. F. M. Chapman, Mr. Gilbert Pearson, and 

 others give their testimony as eye-witnesses to the 

 wholesale slaughter of the egrets and herons of the 

 United States, a slaughter which is being repeated 

 to-day in other lands. The latest testimony comes 

 from Mr. Herbert K. Job, an American ornithologist, 

 who in his new book, " Wild Wings," repeats and 

 emphasizes his strong indictment against the plume 

 hunters, quoted in a previous number (July, 1903) 

 of this paper. Mr. Job penetrated, not as an 

 investigator of the plume question, but as an ardent 

 naturalist, the solitary marshes and wildernesses 

 of Florida, into whose deepest recesses the last 

 remnant of the Florida egrets have been driven 

 by persecution. Even in these unsurveyed and 

 trackless swamps it was no easy matter to discover 

 the birds, or doubtless they too would have been 

 extirpated by the hunters ; and Mr. Job's guide in 

 one expedition was the warden Bradley, who has 

 since been killed in defending the birds from 

 poaching traders. On the first sight of the lovely 

 white birds in their nesting-ground, among the 

 mangrove trees of an almost inaccessible bog, the 

 explorer's feeling was one of pure rapture at the 

 sight : 



" Here I felt I had reached the high-water mark 

 of spectacular sights in the bird-world. Wherever 

 I may penetrate in future wanderings, I never hope 

 to see anything to surpass, or in some respects to 

 equal, that upon which I now gazed." 



But then came the bitter knowledge that this 



A new French League for the Protection of Birds 

 has been founded by Mile, des Varennes, Editor 

 of " La Revue des Animaux." 



* Wild Wings : Adventures of a Camera-Hunter among the larger 

 Wild Birds of North America on Sea and Land. By Herbert 

 Keightley Job, with 160 Illustrations after Photographs. London ; 

 Constable & Co. 



