The Scottish naturalist Volume 5 - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 Excerpt: ... the numbers of our birds, more especially of our smaller song birds, either by cutting off their food supplies or by destroying their nesting grounds. Every field, marsh, or swamp that is drained, lessens the supply of insect life on which a great majority of small birds live; every piece of land that is reclaimed from waste, robs the ground or low bush nesting birds of their habitat. Every wood that is cut down, every gorse-patch that is burned--in short, every advance of cultivation--drives before it some species of birds. It was my fortune to revisit, after a lapse of ten years, a part of the country where some of my earliest birds'-nesting exploits had been carried out. "High-farming" had taken the place of a more primitive agriculture; the thick high hedges where redbacked shrikes, bullfinches, linnets, and long-tailed tits were wont to nest, were supplanted by neat trim-cut hedges three feet high, and not thick enough to offer cover for the smallest of birds. The deep ditches with high grass-grown banks, once the haunt of wood-wren, lesser whitethroat, or whinchat, had disappeared, and patches of gorse and heather, where redpole and linnet once dwelt, had been burnt and stubbed out long ago. These causes, which for the birds' sake we may deplore, we cannot nor should we wish to prevent; and even consolation is to be found in that while one species of bird may be driven out, another suited to the new condition may follow and take its place. The richest arable lands are especially the resort of the lark, who dispels the monotony with his "sweet jargoning." It is rather with preventible causes that we have to deal; and to the indiscriminate and utterly wanton birds'-nesting, for no intelligent or intellectual aim or object, which goes on in every parish...