10 
FOWLS OF THE AIR. 
repute with gamekeepers, because for every five hundred mice and 
rats he catches an owl will pick up a young pheasant or partridge, 
neither of which, by-the-by, has any business to be abroad at 
night. Then there is another bird which has suffered grievously 
by misnomer, being called in the vulgar tongue a fern-owl, night- 
hawk, or goat-sucker. But seeing that he is a relative of the 
swallows, living honestly by catching cockchafers and moths, it is 
kinder to give him his fourth popular name of night-jar. Of all 
the birds of the heath and brake, none is more absolutely innocuous, 
none more fascinating, than this one; yet hundreds are slain every 
year because foolish persons believe they hurt game or suck the 
milk of cattle. 
So great has been the increase of certain small birds in cultivated 
districts that it is sometimes necessary to apply a check in place of 
the natural one that has been removed. But for pity’s sake let it 
be applied in the form of sudden death, and not imprisonment. The 
birdcatcher’s trade is full of untold horrors not less repulsive 
than those of the plume trade. Captivity is bitter to every living 
creature; it must be doubly bitter when it involves the deprivation 
of a faculty distinguishing birds from all other warm - blooded 
animals except bats—a faculty, too, which has been the type of 
freedom in all ages, and which man has applied all his ingenuity 
to acquire without success. 
It is, of course, true that those who cultivate a craze for caged 
birds are not intentionally cruel. They lavish every kind of atten¬ 
tion, wise and unwise, on their pets. It is true, too, that abundant 
warmth and food, combined with little exercise, soon tend, in some 
species, to dull the prisoner’s craving for liberty, and may even cast 
a torpor over the seasonal impulse to migrate. But, even if it were 
a pleasant thought that a cage-bird’s life is only rendered endurable 
by the effect of overfeeding on its natural faculties, a vast amount 
of suffering and of lingering death is brought upon the fowls of 
the air by the preliminary stages of the birdcatcher’s craft. 
It is not generally understood by landowners who deplore the 
raids of bird-snarers that the law has provided them with a 
remedy. Every person, other than an owner or occupier of the 
