Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/252

192 to our shame, from Manchester and other Lancashire centres; these trains were filled not with ornithologists, but with "sportsmen," who shot the trusting fowl when they refused to leave their precious eggs or young. It was butchery of the grossest kind, and the drain on numbers was beyond all calculation, for the young perished of hunger on the ledges. In many cases no effort was made to gather the spoil; gull feathers were too plentiful to make the labour profitable; the excuse of commercialism could not be given; it was sheer brutality.

"If this is not cruelty, what is it?" was Newton's indignant cry. "Can men blaze away hour after hour at these wretched inoffensive birds and call it 'sport' without being morally the worse for it? We thank God that we are not as Spaniards are, who gloat over the brutalities of a bull-fight. Why, here in a dozen places around our own coasts we have annually an amount of agony inflicted on thousands of our fellow-creatures to which the torture of a dozen horses and bulls in a ring is as nothing."

The railway companies advertised the opportunities for sport, and then the subtle trader stepped in and created a fashion in gulls' feathers; the price went up, the dealers were able to offer one shilling per kittiwake, so Cordeaux states, and one man alone boasted that he had slain 4,000 adult birds in one season. Taking into consideration the number of eggs which might have been laid and hatched, the number of young which certainly must have been starved in the nest, and the wounded birds which escaped to slowly perish, it is probable that that single butcher was responsible for a reduction in one year of at least 10,000 birds. "Fair and innocent as the snowy plumes may appear in a lady's hat," says Newton. "I must tell the wearer the truth—she bears the murderer's brand on her forehead."