File:Bird notes and news (1903) (20195480530).jpg

Title: Bird notes and news
Identifier: birdnotesnews1190305roya (find matches)
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
Subjects:
Publisher: London, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
Contributing Library: Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library

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Text Appearing Before Image:
BIRD NOTES *nd NEWS. (fttrntlar fetter issued ^motocallrj brr tJtje octets for tfje fjrotmion of giroa. CONTENTS. Hunting the Wren. Birds in Hats- Birds in Hats— Hon. Mrs. Boyle. Duchess of Portland. Mr. T. Southwell. Lord Medway. "Punch." The "Artificial" Canard Again. Notes- County Challenge Shields. Competition Results. The Police and the Acts. Bird and Tree Day. Tea, Coffee, and Birds. In the Courts. News from Branches. Lectures. No. 4.) London, 3, Hanover Square, W. (DECEMBER, 1903.
Text Appearing After Image:
HUNTING THE WREN. UNTING the wren—a pastime now sup- posed to be obliterated from the list of popular amusements, not only survives but flourishes ; only the venue and the conditions of the game have changed. In former days it was practised on one winter's day in the year, in Ireland and of Man, originating in some untraced superstition, and perpetuated as a sport by the young barbarians of the land. To-day it lasts throughout the nesting season ; the motive is greed ; the object not so much the killing of indi- vidual birds, though that is not unknown, as the taking of nests and eggs ; and the inevitable result the ultimate extirpation of an entire race of this harmless little songster. The small island of St. Kilda and its neigh- bouring islets—masses of rock standing out in the wild Atlantic, fifty miles from anywhere—have long been known as the home of myriads of seabirds ; fulmars and puffins, gannets and guillemots peo- pling densely ledges and burrows wherever eggs can be laid and young birds reared. And to this multitude of wild life the inhabitants of St. Kilda, struggling for existence on some four square miles of inhospitable soil, formerly owed almost their only means of support. The flesh and eggs of the birds were to them for meat ; the fat supplied their light ; the feathers and oil constituted their one trade with the outer world. In consequence of these conditions a solitary exception was made of the island when the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1880 secured a close time for wild birds in all other portions of the United Kingdom. The lack of small land-birds on this isolated and treeless fragment of British territory is as striking as is the abundance of its sea-fowl. One of the latest visitors records the existence of rock-pipit, twite, tree-sparrow, starling, and wheatear as breeding species ; but the one true singing-bird that has made an actual home of this rock is the St. Kilda wren, and this little bird has clung so closely to its island fastness that it has adapted itself in a measure to its peculiar environment, and has come to differ in some slight degree from its relations on the mainland. It is the one special and particular bird of St. Kilda. The presence of the wren at St. Kilda has long been known ; but it was only in 1884 that Mr. Charles Dixon, who found it then abundant, noted its variations from the ordinary type. Its peculiarities were much discussed by ornitho- logists. It was discovered to be a little lighter in colour than the common wren, more con- spicuously barred, with stouter legs and thicker bill, with eggs a trifle bigger, and nest made, per- force, of slightly different material—characteristics definite enough, it was generally decided, to mark a local race, but not to constitute a species—scarcely enough, in fact, to give any distinguishing feature in the eyes of ordinary man. Such small pecu- liarities, however, were enough to excite a feverish

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