8 
County 
Council 
Orders. 
“ Exemp¬ 
tion” from 
protection. 
Sea-birds 
suid fisli. 
Eighteen County Council Orders, affecting twelve County 
Council areas in England, three in Wales, and one in 
Ireland, and two Borough Councils in England, have been 
issued in 1904. These include Orders for Hereford and 
Nottinghamshire, the latest of the English counties to claim 
their powers under the Bird Protection Acts. It is so far satis¬ 
factory to be able to chronicle a full list, but many Orders are 
of a defective character; and there yet remain 44 County Boroughs 
and two Welsh counties without Orders ; those of Ireland are, 
wdth two or three exceptions, limited to an extension of Close 
Time for game; and the whole of the Scottish Orders require 
renewal as they expire in February, 1905. It may be urged 
that protection is superfluous in large towns, where few varieties 
of wild birds are seen, but experience lias shown that, having 
regard to the wide suburban areas often included in County 
Boroughs, and to the simplification of protection work, it is 
well that these should be at least brought into line with their 
counties, even where no further measures are adopted for pre¬ 
serving such warblers, tits, and finches as remain to cheer the 
dwellers among bricks and mortar. 
The difficulty which so many persons have in comprehending 
the scope of the Acts has been conspicuously illustrated lately by 
the action of one or two agricultural bodies, who have called for 
the removal of protection from various birds on the ground that 
since farmer and gardener have been forbidden to kill them they 
have inordinately increased to the detriment of crops. As none 
of the birds named in any of the complaints made are species 
scheduled by the Act, and extremely few of them have been added 
to it by any local Order, landowners and tenants retain the privilege 
they have always possessed of destroying such birds on their own 
land, or of employing persons to do so, even in the nesting 
season. Moreover few farmers or fruit-growers would benefit by 
the trespass of casual and unauthorised marauders on their 
land, under the plea of bird-catching, between February and 
September. In point of fact the Acts are among the best legal 
weapons the farmer possesses ; while affording him liberty to 
keep down species he believes destructive, they give him power 
to obtain, through his County Council, protection for the owls 
and larger hawks which are his invaluable allies by their 
destruction of rats and mice and such small deer, and for the 
insectivorous species whose bills are continuously waging war 
on the agriculturists’ innumerable little enemies. 
A second plea for exemption has been raised in the case of 
certain sea-birds on account of their consumption of fish ; and 
considerable entertainment has been caused by the computations 
of an ingenious gentleman who set out to prove how many 
