I879.J 
Birds' -Nesting. 
481 
of land that is reclaimed from waste robs the ground or low 
bush nesting birds of their habitat ; every wood that is cut 
down, every gorse-patch that is burned, — in short, every 
advance of cultivation, — drives before it some species of 
birds. 
It was my fortune to revisit, after a lapse of ten years, a 
part of the country where some of my earliest birds’-nesting 
exploits had been carried out. “ High-farming ” had taken 
the place of a more primitive agriculture ; the thick high 
hedges where red-backed shrikes, bullfinches, linnets, and 
long-tailed tits were wont to nest, were supplanted by neat 
trim-cut hedges 3 feet high, and not thick enough to offer 
cover for the smallest of birds. The deep ditches with high 
grass-grown banks, once the haunt of wood wren, lesser 
whitethroat, or whinchat, had disappeared, and patches of 
gorse and heather, where redpole and linnet once dwelt, had 
been burnt and stubbed out long ago. These causes, which 
for the birds’ sake we may deplore, we cannot nor should 
we wish to prevent ; and even consolation is to be found in 
that while one species of bird may be driven out, another 
suited to the new condition may follow and take its place. 
The richest arable land are especially the resort of the lark, 
who dispels the monotony with his “ sweet jargoning.” It 
is rather with preventible causes that we have to deal ; and 
to the indiscriminate and utterly wanton birds’-nesting, for 
no intelligent or intellectual aim or objeCt, which goes on 
in every parish in the country, a check must be applied. 
Here it is that the authority of parents and schoolmasters 
should come into force. It is in most cases due as much to 
ignorance as to wantonness or destructiveness that the 
youthful birds’-nester takes eggs for which he has no use- 
no idea of use, in faCt ; they serve to gratify his instinCt for 
finding and possessing pretty objects, and then are strung 
on a string as an ornament, or made cockshies of as an 
amusing pastime. Had he been taught anything of the im- 
portance of the nest and eggs to the continuance of the 
parent birds, — or had any faCts of their history, as of how 
birds differ from other animals, or how, in a sense, a nest 
and eggs are as much a part of the mother as the embryos 
of viviparous animals, — his nesting for pure wanton destruc- 
tion of his spoil would at least be checked ; or if he proved 
not amenable to such reasoning, should be forcibly prevented 
and heavily punished. But a remedy for checking birds’- 
nesting in the intelligent boy who wishes to avoid wanton- 
ness, but at the same time claims a right to make his 
