Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 9 June 1916
June 8
“I came across six dead herons tied to a tree in the Goyt Valley,” writes a friend of mine. Some of them were quite young, evidently not having left the nest, and all had been killed about the same time. One reader of the “Manchester Guardian,” if he sees this note, will be especially annoyed; he has watched the birds here for years, even before he was certain that a small heronry had been established. Now some law-breaking keeper or water bailiff has apparently waited until the young birds were hatched to murder the whole brood; it was on the Cheshire side, and the heron is a protected bird in Cheshire. Much good protection seems to be! The sportsman, or the sportsman’s agents, appear to care nothing about the law, unless a sportsman of another type, usually called a poacher, is the offender.
The object of wild bird protection was to prove that wild birds were public or rather national property, but probably the excuse would be that it does not matter in war-time. Many of our finest sportsmen, however, have refused to preserve game during the war, but they, or at any rate some of them, observe the law and protect the scheduled birds.
Continue reading…
Source: Guardian Environment