These questions are perpetually being asked, and are continually 
receiving different answers, according to the predilections, the 
knowledge, and the patience of the speaker, and according as the 
husbandman’s season is a good or a bad one. 
The charge against the Acts may be quickly disposed of. In 
spite of the institution of a Close Time, there is no bird fairly 
chargeable with any appreciable damage which the owner or tiller 
of the soil is prohibited by the Act from slaughtering at any 
period of the year. A few debatable birds may have been added 
to the list of scheduled birds by a County Council here and there; 
but County Councils are representative bodies, and may be safely 
left to answer for their deeds to those wliom they represent. On 
the other hand, the Acts, as framed and as administered by the 
Councils, serve greatly to protect not only our rare, useful, and 
beautiful birds, but also the larger birds of prey, which have had 
little chance in recent times to keep down the smaller species, 
because they themselves have been indiscriminately and relentlessly 
trapped and shot by the gamekeeper. 
In considering the utility of birds it is customary to divide 
them into insectivorous and otherwise, and to view all those that 
are “ otherwise ” as man’s enemies in the field and garden. 
No theory could be more misleading. Few species are either 
entirely insectivorous or entirely vegetarian ; and both hard-billed 
and soft-billed include among them man’s allies in the cultivation 
of the ground. Both will inevitably eat the food for which they 
are adapted by nature, whether the produce be wild fruit or 
cultivated fruit, thistle-seed or wheat; whether it be food which 
man claims as all his own or such as he pronounces rubbish to 
which they are more than welcome. And it must in fairness be 
allowed that the birds have a right to a share, not only by the 
laws of natural right, but because they have earned it. 
Take, for example, the thrush. All the year round, the thrush 
is busily engaged in killing and eating snails, slugs, worms, grubs, 
and chrysalides; in the summer he takes some strawberries and 
currants. 
Now, the snails and slugs he has destroyed before would have 
crawled in countless numbers over the strawberries, devouring 
as they went; the worms (useful in their way when not super¬ 
abundant) would have reduced the lawn to a rough expanse of 
brown castings. The gardener would do his best for the fruit, 
and mow and roll the lawn, but he might employ a boy—or 
half-a-dozen boys—all day long, without getting rid of the snails 
and grubs with which the thrushes and blackbirds feed their young 
families and themselves, and the lawn would be in desperate case. 
For the few weeks that the fruit is ripe it can be netted— 
