6o 
The Balance of Nature. 
[April, 
inhabitants of the outskirts of London and of the suburban 
villages may see, every Sunday morning during the so-called 
“ close season,” troops of bird-catchers going forth to their 
vocation, and returning about io to 12 a.m., the cage holding 
their prisoners being covered over with cloth, so that no one 
may be compelled to see how the law is being broken. As 
for the police, they are too busy watching the movements of 
the bona fide traveller ever to ask an inconvenient question 
as to the contents of those mysterious packages slung over 
the shoulders of the unwashed depredators. Would it not 
be possible to form an association for the enforcement of 
the law ? 
Lastly, we must point out, as a cause of the decrease of 
our beautiful and useful birds, the destruction of the woods, 
and the removal of the old hedges and hedgerow trees, which 
once redeemed English rural scenery from the “ mad mono- 
tony ” of the cultivated lands in most parts of the Continent. 
Here we have again to differ from Mr. Morant, who thinks 
it a mistake to imagine that man drives away birds by 
clearing and cultivating the earth. He thus falls into that 
most dangerous kind of error — a half truth. 
In the depths of the primaeval forests neither birds nor 
inseCts are very numerous, as Messrs. Bates and Wallace 
take occasion to point out, and as we have in former days 
learned to our cost. It is along the margin of a clearing, 
at the edge of the lake, the river, or the savanna, or where 
the woodland meets the cultivated land, that both species 
and individuals are most numerous. But if you clear the 
forest entirely away, and convert the cultivated land into a 
treeless, bushless waste, divided merely by wire fences, or 
by low thin lines of stubbed thorn hedges, incapable of 
sheltering the smallest bird, then you get rid of most inseCts, 
save those that prey upon your crops, and of the birds that 
would have kept the latter in due check. This denudation 
of the country has been tried in Spain, and the consequence 
is that the land is desolated with grasshoppers, and that 
forests are being now planted at national expense in order to 
afford shelter to insectivorous birds. The system of enor- 
mous fields divided merely by rail or wire fences has been 
largely adopted in the Western States of America, and from 
those States come heavy and well-founded complaints of the 
ravages of grasshoppers and vermin in general. Small 
birds cannot be expected to fly from 3 to 4 miles for every 
caterpillar or worm they carry home to their nestlings. 
If we wish to preserve them, and to secure the benefit of 
their services, we must see to it that there is suitable cover 
