EXTERMINATION OF BRITISH BIRDS. 25 
THE EXTERMINATION OF BRITISH BIRDS. 
HE great historian of the Crimean war, who has just 
been taken from us, speaking of the Russians at the 
battle of the Alma, has a famous passage in which 
he describes the vanquished. “From the enemies’ 
battalions standing massed in the hollow, there rose up— as 
though it had been rung from the very hearts of brave men 
defeated — a long, sorrowful, wailing sound. This was the bitter 
and wholesome grief of a valiant soldiery not content to yield. 
For men who so grieve there is hope.” (Kinglake’s Crimea, 
ii. p. 333.) Such words may describe the present condition of 
those lovers of birds who have seen now for three years running 
the internecine war and massacre on harmless wild birds on our 
shores and in our woods, done to death not for food, or its 
protection, but for their beauty and plumage and sprightliness 
of form ; to adorn, it may be, a bootmaker’s shop, or a grocer’s 
Christmas front, or a fishmonger’s slab, or (if found worthy to 
reach the present dead-bird’s paradise, so different from Ovid’s) 
the human face divine of English ladies, surmounted in its 
citadel of thought by nests of dead and agonised birds that 
wriggle like Medusa’s serpents, all awry. At this witless, 
reckless, most cruel fashion, for many of the birds have died in 
protecting their young, thoughtful people give vent to the low 
wail of indignation and wrath. The madness may pass away 
some day, as the sour Puritan madness that reigned in England 
during Cromwellian times for about ten years, and after it had 
destroyed ten thousand lovely things, left England poor indeed, 
but at all events wise enough never to tolerate such madness 
again. Scarecrows, however terrible, have their uses. 
Now, some people may say this is exaggeration. The first 
witness that I shall summon is the Kingfisher, Alcecio ispida. 
Who has ever adequately described his vivid lustre, that flash of 
living turquoise blue, brighter than the blue-bell because it 
moves, outshining the more azure blue of the swollen March 
streams, and the white frill of their waves, and the new spring 
green of the bushes, and as it flies from you first taking the 
shape of a passion flower over the waters, and then at last 
looping into an old-fashioned Medieval M similar to that which 
Millais used for the signature of his masterpieces ? The King- 
fisher has its praise from Tennyson, who described it in In 
Memoviam as “The sea-blue bird of March and this year, in 
the Progress of Spring, the halcyon or Kingfisher has its throne 
In her open palm a halcyon sits, 
Patient — the secret splendour of the brooks. 
But where are our Kingfishers ? Almost gone. Hampshire says 
“decreasing.” Oxfordshire “ cruelty persecuted.” Sussex may 
say the same. It is not the cold long frosts that have killed 
them (for we have not had many of late), though beyond doubt 
