83Q 
Wild Birds ii/i Relatio7i to Agricidture. 
too — the short-tailed field mouse — has increased in a prodigious 
manner. Only last year (1872) in my parish a farmer who keeps 
a mowing machine had to give up cutting a grass field he had 
undertaken to mow as he could not do it with credit, his machine 
getting clogged with the grass matted by the nests of the mice.” 
I wish I could give the Rector’s account of the wild birds in Mr. 
Waterton’s Park. I myself in youth visited that old naturalist. 
Knowing the family, he exclaimed in my bashful presence, “Ah, 
ha ! he is one of the old brood ! ” In regard to birds, Waterton 
summed up thus : the more you leave Nature to itself the better, 
except where civilisation has altered Nature’s balance.' 
Turning from the appendix with regret, and reverting to the 
categorical evidence, gamekeepers are much blamed for their 
mistaken zeal in the extermination of the sparrowhawk, the 
only bird that can catch a wood-pigeon — the hawk only nibbles 
a tit-bit, and then immediately kills another pigeon, and so on ; 
the wood-pigeon is the natural food of the sparrow-hawk.'^ 
Nine-tenths of the wood-pigeons in winter are Norway bred 
or from the North of Scotland.^ Canon Tristram, P.R.S., said '* 
gamekeepers are very inaccurate in their observations, the 
most inaccurate class of men existing ; any large bird with a 
hooked beak and claws is to him an enemy ; keepers never ex- 
amine crops and stomachs. Anyway, rare birds are certain to 
be shot down for birdstuffers and naturalists.® The professional 
bird-catchers carefully watch the March and the Michaelmas 
flight of birds,® but it is related of a gamekeeper’ that he argued 
“The cuckoo turns into a hawk in the winter : leastways, what 
becomes of the cuckoo ? ” 
I think myself tliis is rather hard on the poor keeper; he 
is probably neither much better nor much worse than the class 
whence he is drawn, if anything I should say from my own 
experience rather better — without book-learning, he has usually 
conversed with educated people, and probably to his profit he 
has sat down and chewed the cud of improving reflection. 
Sad to say, fair ladies — gentle dames — have not escaped 
scatheless from the searching examination before the Commons’ 
Committee ; it seems that the mines of Golconda, the pearl 
fisheries of Southern Seas, the Carden of Eden with its flowers 
and its fiuit?, never forgetting the foliage, would not satisfy their 
insatiate desire for objects to be used in personal adornment ; 
they have ravaged the beasts of the field, and the fowls of 
the air are being devastated for the pui'pose of obtaining heads, 
skins, and feathers for these sumptuary purposes. One scien- 
tific ornithologist was greatly overcome at a party on seeing a 
I l>9. * 38. > 129. ‘ 212, ‘ 725. « 3182. » 105, 
