52
NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
Woodcock in Epping Forest.—Mr. F. H. Carruthers Gould states that
on February 9th, 1895, he flushed a woodcock from the ditch behind the Bancroft
School, immediately facing Whitehall Road, Woodford. "It was," he says,
"evidently attracted there by the unfrozen state of a small drain. It speaks
for the great distress of our wild birds during this severe frost, when so shy
a bird as the woodcock is forced to seek its food so near human habitation."
According to Mr. Buxton ("Epping Forest," p. 9;), "the woodcock is not an
infrequent visitor to the forest during the winter months," but, he adds, "the
absence of springs and the hardness of the soil are unfavourable to them, and they
are never numerous where cattle have access." They have been known to breed
upon the forest, and many instances of their doing so in other parts of the
county are recorded in the "Birds of Essex."—Ed).
Occurrence of the Bearded Tit (Panurus biarmicus) and other
Notable Birds in Essex.—I yesterday visited our local Bird-stuffer, Mr.
Pettitt, and saw several birds in process of drying, which had been captured during
this year and the last few months of 1894. Some of them may be worth noticing
in The Essex Naturalist. There was one specimen of the Bearded Tit
(Panurus biarmicus) which had been picked up dead on March 30th, 1895, near
Harwich ; one Norfolk Plover (Oedicnemus scolopax), shot at Earl's Colne in 1895 ;
a Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), shot at West Bergholt, September, 1894 ; a Ruff
(Machetes pugnax), shot September, 1894, at East Mersea ; a Bittern (Botaurus
stellaris), shot January, 1895, at Bures ; and several Little Auks (mergulus alle),
captured in various parts of the county in January of this year. Although none
of these birds are actually very rare, the occurrence of the Bearded Tit near
Harwich is of interest, as showing that this species still probably exists in the reed
beds of our marshes.—Henry Laver, F.L.S., Colchester, April 25th, 1895.
Birds and their Persecutors.—In the "Nineteenth Century" for January,
1895, there is an article by Ouida on this subject, most of her remarks being on
the destruction of birds in Italy. I remember, when lat Naples in 1889, how
strange seemed the almost total absence of birds in the environs, except in the
grounds around an old Bourbon palace, where they had been accidentally pre-
served. The wanton destruction of birds of all kinds, large and small, is char-
acteristic of all parts of Italy. Ouida states : "They are classed, in the Italian
mind, with beetles, rats, and vermin generally." But they have, unlike beetles
and rats, the reputation of being edible, and, though the Italians are said, by
Ouida, to be "a nation without a palate," they draw the line somewhere between
he eatable and the uneatable, as the fewness of birds and the abundance of
lizards and bats in Italy sufficiently illustrates. But the most important fact in
the article is a demonstration of the fact that this idiotic destruction of birds is
not simply a local evil, though Italy is a special sufferer from the frightful increase
of insect plagues. Ouida states that :
" The ornithophil societies of France and Switzerland have more than once
written to me that unless birds be protected in Italy they must perish all over
Europe, since so great a variety of races wing their way to the south in winter,
and there are ruthlessly murdered."
Of the prospects of legislative action we learn :
" When the locusts appear in large swarms in some districts, as they did in
Tuscany last year, there is, for the moment, loud talk of forbidding the capture
and slaughter of birds for three or four years, but, unhappily, when the locusts go
the fear of them goes also, the lesson which they taught is forgotten, and the