24 
MY SANCTUARY. 
T is a very sad thing to learn from what Mr. Joseph 
Nunn states in the Transactions of the Hertfordshire 
Natural History Society, that birds are becoming rarer 
in my part of England. My hope and my impression 
had been that the main cause of this was the inevitable advance 
of bricks and mortar destroying the haunts and feeding-places 
of the songsters ; but Mr. Nunn has a sadder tale to tell. If he 
is right, it is not only the spread of suburban London, but the 
stupidity of the gamekeeper and gunner, which is having this 
deplorable result. Rare birds, I am afraid, are becoming every 
year more rare, because of the persistence with which they are 
shot as soon as ever they are observed. 
It is difficult to see how the evil is to be remedied unless 
landowners can be induced to make their estates, in some 
measure at least, sanctuaries for scarce and interesting birds 
which, as things are now, seem on the point of being exter- 
minated. For the last five-and-twenty years there has been no 
shooting on this place, other than for keeping down rabbits. 
Although it is of small extent, only comprising a hundred 
and seventy acres, and situated within eleven miles of London, 
these fields and woods are fully tenanted by several kinds of owls 
and hawks, the green, and greater spotted woodpeckers, nightjars, 
lapwings, and a great variety of the smaller species of birds. 
Nuthatches abound ; we have five species of titmice, gold crests, 
blackcaps, tree-creepers, and nightingales. The woodcock is 
sometimes seen in the spinney, and snipe, both in the running 
water of the park and along the edge of the wheat-fields. There 
is no lack of warblers and finches to make the woods vocal in 
spring and summer. This, I think, may be considered a highly 
satisfactory result of protective care. On a fairly-sized sheet of 
water we see hundreds of mallards, and an occasional heron visits 
us from a neighbouring reservoir. 
When the cold weather sets in the place is visited by wigeon, 
teal, and the lesser grebe ; moor-hens and coots are always 
flitting about in the rushes and flags, and rear as many young 
birds as may happen to escape the jaws of the large pike, the 
only permitted poachers which exist at the lake. 
This winter I have met with two curious instances of 
albinism and melanism. A snow-white and jet-black mallard 
may be seen in the lake swimming about w r ith the other ducks, 
and when the flock rise up for a flight, the black mallard 
generally precedes the rest, and seems elected to be their leader. 
There are, also, in the garden two parti-coloured blackbirds, one 
almost white, and the other rendered conspicuous by his black 
and white plumage. 
I should rejoice to hear that such protection as I give to the 
feathered creation were more widely extended to our rare birds, 
and that the owls and the kestrels, being essentially mousers, 
