Not where along unlovely ways
The roaring tide of trouble flows—
but secluded tracts of land, such as still exist in many counties of
Wales particularly, were protected, many of our partially extinct birds
would avail themselves of the opportunity of breeding again in the old
home of their ancestors. In these days of cheap cartridges, few birds
that are not catalogued as common, are suffered to exist, and the rarer
the species so much the less chance has it of surviving. Speaking
generally, the sportsman—I mean the man who is fond of a gun and who
protects rather than exterminates those birds and animals not really
destructive—is the friend rather than the foe of our wild life, but the
class of gamekeeper who, often against his employer’s instructions,
kills anything that his imagination can conceive to be harmful or
uncommon is responsible for much of the extinction now going on. The
loafer who “pots” seals and swallows on Sundays, and earns his beer by
selling skins of kingfishers (for the kingfisher is yet another that
must now be considered rare) and other rarities to local “naturalists”
is a tyrant of the meanest order, a parasite upon his own kind and a
terror to all things beautiful and rare. In speaking upon this subject
one wishes to refrain from any sickly sentiment, of which there has
already been a super-abundance. The effect of much that has been written
and spoken on the extinction of our wild birds has been neutralised on
account of the rabid and ultra-sentimental way in which enthusiasts have
expressed their views and feelings, and, as in the case of
“vivisection,” many people who might have been workers for good have
been reluctant to join forces with those who have clamoured and preached
so extravagantly. Owing to the efforts of private individuals and the
various societies, a great deal has been done to protect the wild life
that is annually becoming scarcer; but much remains to be done, and most
particularly in the case of those few straggling remnants of our
avifauna, viz., the bitterns and bustards, hen-harriers and
marsh-harriers, eagles and kites, hoopoes and ravens, and others of that
sad, long list of birds, the most beautiful and noblest that ever gave
lustre to our avian population.
It is strange, too, that all, or nearly all, these declining races were
denizens of the marshlands or the mountain where the voice of a bird is
ever such a welcome sound, and to-day when the chilly winds of a March
evening drive through the lank, dry grass with a whistling sound, or
surge and whisper in the heather, to which still cling last year’s faded
flowers, when the curlew and the plover break the solitude with their
wild, yet plaintive cries, when the last dipper has shot like a black
dart round the bend of the stream, and the skylarks, that have been
joyously singing far up in the sky the day long, have sank silently into
the beds of rushes, then, when the wind sinks away into the still dark
valley below, one feels that Nature is still waiting and listening for
the ringing boom of the bittern to herald the birth of the marshland
spring. But only the shepherd’s dog barks intermittently in the
darkness, and a voice like that of some belated sheep falls dreamily
upon the air of night. Up there, where the club moss stands sturdily in
the crisp snow, the grim old rocks that have witnessed man’s coming, and
will, perchance, witness his passing, look down upon these “haunts of
ancient peace,” and we ponder over the changes that time has wrought in
the solitary spot.