BIRD SUPERSTITIONS. 
173 
But it is superstitions of another and more hurtful kind which 
more particularly interest Selbornians, beliefs mostly erroneous, 
and which are the cause of the slaughter of thousands of useful 
birds. It might be thought that those who spend their lives in 
the fields, with the book of Nature always open before them, 
would at least know what animals were prejudicial to their 
business, and how far others were useful to them. Unfortunately, 
this is not always so. Prejudice and tradition too often out- 
weigh personal experience and actual fact. You may give a game- 
keeper ocular proofs that owls and kestrels rarely eat birds, and 
do far* more, by reason of their fondness for mice and rats, to 
preserve game than to destroy it ; yet the next time you pass 
his museum, you will see dangling from a nail the mangled 
remains of several of such birds. And the same irrational and un- 
just treatment is dealt out to many other feathered friends. One 
gardener boasted of having killed, last year, nearly two hundred 
blackbirds in his gardens. And for what reason ? They pecked 
his fruit when ripe. For eleven months they were his most 
diligent workers, destroying an incalculable number of slugs and 
insects, which, without the aid of the birds the gardener could 
not have reached, and which, if undisturbed, would probably have 
destroyed the whole crop. Yet because the birds helped them- 
selves to a little of the fruit they had helped to bring to perfec- 
tion they must be maimed and killed. Truly we are a just and 
generous people. It does not seem to require more than an 
ordinar}^ logical mind to recognise that labour must be paid for 
in some form, and thus the fruit the birds take may fairly be 
treated as wages due to them for labour done. If we admit this 
and then argue that they merit destruction because they devour 
produce which would otherwise be turned into money — the only 
reason for their slaughter that can be given — the same reasoning 
would condemn the horses that draw the plough, for they eat 
some of the corn they help to raise, and we have only to go a 
step further and think of the wages we pay, to justify a general 
massacre of farm labourers, which, in the language of our old 
friend Euclid, would be absurd. 
Is it being too sanguine to say that the coming generation will 
be wiser and more merciful in this respect than the present ? 
Will the increased facilities for acquiring knowledge bring about 
the death of such cruel errors ? We must hope so, but past 
experience is not encouraging. Think of the amount of work 
done in this direction during the last decade, and still the 
slaughter of the innocents goes on. Many err, we are told, from 
ignorance or thoughtlessness. We can each do something to 
lessen these causes, but they cannot excuse all. Think of all the 
eloquent pleading that has been circulated in nearly every journal 
in our land, until it is almost impossible to believe that anyone 
can be ignorant of the cruelties of feathered trimmings, and yet 
“ feathered women ” still abound. Surely it will not always be so. 
A time must soon come when, recognising the grandeur and 
