m 
Although I have no wish to be unduly hard on County Councils 
in the matter of their incongruous provisions for the protection of birds, 
it is certain that the technical knowledge of the various members of 
such bodies is not to- be blindly trusted. For instance, while mentally 
applauding the excellence of their intentions, what field-naturalist can 
have read without a contemptuous smile that those in authority have 
deliberately scheduled and protected the osprey, the honey buzzard, and 
the bearded tit—the latter, the reed-pheasant of the Norfolk Broads— 
in the county of Middlesex ! On the question of the desirability of 
protecting these birds there will not be two opinions, but that they 
should have been allowed to appear in the metropolitan “ list ” only 
demonstrates! how unfamiliar with the haunts, habits, and distribution 
of the three species enumerated, those were who framed it. Almost 
with equal reason might they have aspired to protect the great auk 
within the boundaries of their jurisdiction! It is seldom, indeed, that 
we are confronted with so apposite an illustration of zeal outstripping 
knowledge. But enough for the present of errors on the part of County 
Councils so far as bird legislation is concerned, though I cannot refrain 
from adding that, had I the space and inclination, the series might be 
very appreciably extended. My aim in what I have thus ventured, 
let me observe, lias not been out of sheer wantonness to gibbet County 
Councillors and their advisers wholesale,, but rather to conclusively 
establish the fact of their—in many cases—unfitness for the work that 
has been delegated to them. Underlying my strictures, of course, is 
the earnest hope that prompt steps may be taken to* ensure a better 
state of things in the future. 
If legislation, where birds and birds’ eggs are concerned, is to proceed 
on sound and practical lines, the sooner it is recognsed that a basis 
of common action for the whole of the Kingdom is indispensable, the 
better. To have a species protected on one side of a road, and not on 
the other, is the apotheosis of absurdity. The loopholes that now exist 
for an evasion of the law, the comparative absence of prosecutions for 
breaches of it, the inadequate penalties imposed when people on arraign¬ 
ment have been found guilty of infringing it, to say nothing of the 
excusable lack of technical knowledge on the part of magistrates in 
common with the police:—all this, I maintain, is amply sufficient in its 
most powerful combination to render the varying and divergent “ orders ” 
under the Wild Birds Protection Acts the laughing-stock of scientific 
naturalists. 
