PEE ee DW BON BULLE BIN 45 
Lord Grey’s Bird Bill 
N the House of Lords yesterday the Committee stage of Viscount 
| Grey’s Bill for the protection of wild birds was completed. 
Though the Bill has been subjected to minor criticism and amend- 
ment, with the prospect of more alterations in the Report stage, little 
evidence was forthcoming in yesterday’s debate to bear out Lord Craw- 
ford’s contention on second reading that the Bill goes beyond the 
warrant of public sentiment. The Bill is intended to consolidate the 
confused state of the law about wild birds and to make it easier to ad- 
minister. Discussion yesterday fastened, as might be expected, on the 
treatment of one or two species of birds which are often regarded as nox- 
ious and therefore not deserving of human protection. The Bill makes 
no mention of noxious birds as such, but it appears to leave sufficient 
means open to prevent any species from becoming a local plague. 
Of the rarer British birds the Bill recognizes two categories—those 
which, with their nests and eggs, are to be protected at all times, and 
those which, with their eggs and nests, are to be protected only in a de- 
fined closed season. Towards the rights of both kinds of birds the public 
conscience has been for years growing more sensitive. The man who 
kills a rare bird simply because it is a rarity 1s now universally repro- 
bated—humane opinion usually has no word bad enough for him; but 
rare birds have other enemies, none the less dangerous because they mas- 
querade as servants of science. In the name of oology, which is, after 
all, only Greek for egg-collecting, a good many crimes are committed. 
A bird, frequent enough elsewhere, may be scarce and breed little in 
these islands; oologists, however, are often not content with a specimen 
of the egg, but insist that it shall be a home-laid egg—one, or several, 
perhaps, of only a few clutches laid in Great Britain. If the Bill dis- 
courages this particular form of egg-collecting, science will not suffer. 
In any case, there may justly be occasions where the interests of classi- 
ficatory science ought to give way to those of life, the ornithologist’s 
to the bird-lover’s. It is as the lover of birds, their host and their en- 
tertainer, that Lord Grey appeals, as he has appealed before in public 
addresses and lectures, in this Bill, and there are many who would rather 
be assured, on hearsay alone, that such and such bird still breeds on our 
hills and shores than see a stuffed specimen, the last perhaps ever caught 
in England, through a glass in a museum. The future of many of the 
noble fauna of the earth, the irreplaceable products of eeons of evolution, 
is bound to be doubtful as mankind advances upon their strongholds; 
the great cats, on account of their habits and conditions of life, may have 
but a few years before them and if they become extinct the blame will 
not wholly rest at man’s door. But it is otherwise with the race of birds. 
