Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/251

Rh and willing to pay all his expenses, with a substantial margin for himself to boot? Is this likely to prove any deterrent? I would have every bird that was not proved to be distinctly injurious to agricultural or horticultural produce properly protected for a certain season by a proper law, properly enforced; and should any bonâ fide collectors desire eggs or specimens of any particular species, they should, on payment of a fixed fee, receive a proper permit to acquire the same. When the true history of the gradual extermination of many of our rare and interesting birds comes to be written, a very heavy indictment will have to be laid at the door of the egg-robber, who takes every clutch that he can come across, if perchance one should differ slightly from the rest. Drainage and reclamation of the bird's favourite haunts, and the increase and spread of an ever-growing population, are very important factors in the case, but the trail of the egg-collector is over them all; and the worst of it is that many collectors pose as naturalists with their right hand, and with their left employ men, honest enough fellows as a rule, but in these hard times glad enough to earn an additional penny, to collect for them every clutch of the eggs of some particular bird that they can come across. Such a collector can only be compared to his ornithological prototype, that arch-robber the Carrion Crow. Birds which are rare in one particular place are generally pretty common in some other locality; and it has always been a mystery to me why such ridiculously high prices should be offered by collectors for certain British taken eggs, when these are common enough upon the Continent. The eggs of certain birds have acquired an altogether fictitious value, and as a consequence are practically farmed by certain people to whom their nesting haunts are known. Here in Yorkshire a great amount of good has been done by the extension of the close-season, so that now most of the vast concourse of seafowl that breed in the cliffs, in certain places, get off their young in safety; but before that happy event, as I have mentioned elsewhere, cruelty, which I can only characterize as damnable, used to be practised. So-called sportsmen used to go out, on the opening day, with the avowed intention of firing away so many cartridges; they never even troubled to pick up one quarter of what they shot; and I have witnessed the pitiable sight of a wounded Guillemot, with broken wing and its wounds exposed to the salt sea-water, trying to clamber up the cliff with a fish in its bill, to its starving young one, many of which perished through the death or maiming of their parents.

Conversant as I am with almost every phase of Yorkshire bird-life, I have often procured immunity for certain species by the judicious distribution of a little of the current coin of the realm; but at the same time I have at times been obliged to witness scenes of which I thoroughly disapproved, but which I was powerless to prevent; and so, to a certain