“This list could perhaps be extended,” Mr. R. Rathbun, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute (whose kindness I have to thank for this information), adds at the end of his letter.
His communications have also been of special interest to me because they awoke in me old recollections. In the ‘forties of the past century my father received a letter from North America in which he was informed that on ground over which the New York of to-day extends, one could shoot in a single day hundreds of woodcock. I myself, in my young days, used to take care of a beautifully coloured parrot, of a kind that since then has been almost extirpated, and is hardly to be obtained any longer. Connurus carolinensis is the name of this beautiful species of parrot, which also appears on the list of extinct animals of North America. There, too, men have begun to give strong practical expression to the movement for animal protection. In sanctuaries like Yellowstone Park there is complete protection for all animal life, including beasts of prey, and the bears have become so tame that they allow visitors to come within a few paces of them. Count E. Bernstorff, who received permission to shoot one of the few bisons still preserved in the State of Wyoming, says “One might take the way in which the animal life of America is protected as an example in securing still better preservation for the survivors of the primeval wild life of Africa. One must acknowledge that the Americans and their noble President, a brave sportsman, are now doing all that is possible in this matter.”
President Roosevelt, in fact, has come forward manfully in the lists as a champion of widely extended protection for all the beauties of nature, and especially of the animal world. He endeavours by his words and writings to work effectually for these great and noble ideas, which bring to all men delight, profit, and contentment.[28]
Brought up in the school of German sportsmanship, I had later on to change completely my view as to our distinction between “noxious animals” and “beasts of prey.” The African wilderness swarms with beasts of prey, and yet also swarms with useful wild animals. The waters of Africa teem with the fish destroyers, and also teem with fish. We should not therefore act so short-sightedly and pedantically. We should not be so eager to hunt down the last fox, the last pine-marten. The nesting-places of herons and cormorants are becoming ever fewer; the places where the handsome black tree storks build in our German Fatherland can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand; and the same is nearly true of the nesting-places of our rarer birds of prey.
The killing of a wild cat has already become an event; it is the same with the eagle-owl.
Out of the mass of literature of recent date bearing on the subject, I take a single book. In a very readable essay, Der Uhu in Böhmen, Kurt Loos shows that only a few years ago this interesting and beautiful large owl (Bubo maximus) was to be found making its home to the extent of some fifty pairs in thirty-five districts of Bohemia; now only eighteen pairs are living there, in ten districts. The author demands protection for the surviving pairs of owls, as natural objects that should be preserved, and he makes out a strong case for his proposal. Röntgen-ray photographs are among the illustrations of this interesting work, and they suggest that in times when one can do one’s work with such excellent appliances, there is all the more reason for avoiding the thoughtless neglect of legacies left to us by Nature from the days of its primeval beauty.
Numerous other examples of the rapid disappearance of certain species in our Fatherland might be quoted here. Unfortunately we have, on the whole, very little right to reproach the people of Southern Europe on the subject of their custom of carrying on a systematic massacre of birds; for we ourselves are always trapping thrushes and larks, and there is the shooting of the woodcock in spring. There can be no doubt that, if we would give up this spring shooting of the woodcock, this bird, which has so won the heart of the German sportsman, would breed abundantly in our forests. On sporting estates in the wooded hills in Baden I have had occasion to observe this bird nesting; and it is to be regretted that German sportsmen, who in other matters obey the customs of the chase with such scrupulous conscientiousness, do not spare this bird in the spring-time, although they are thus extirpating from their hunting grounds a bird that breeds in the woodlands of our country. The North American woodcock is in process of extinction, for it also is not spared by sportsmen in its breeding grounds, and it is just as little in safety from them in its winter quarters. It is thus one of the disappearing birds of North America, whilst our European woodcock is not so much exposed to harm from systematic pursuit either in its partly inaccessible northern breeding grounds or in its winter abode. But it is indeed difficult to abolish old, deep-rooted practices that are no longer abreast of the times. “Che vuole, signore?—il piacere della caccia!” was the reply of an Italian to a tourist who remonstrated with him on the subject of the extraordinarily widespread destruction of doves by means of nets in Northern Italy. The same answer would probably be given by the monks[29] of certain islands of the Mediterranean, who, keeping up an old custom, kill countless multitudes of turtle-doves during their migration. These are their favourite dainties, and they also export them largely in a preserved state. So, too, it will be a difficult matter to obtain from German sportsmen the complete abandonment of their pleasant spring campaign against the woodcock. Through the very interesting experiments of the Duke of Northumberland, who had marks put upon numbers of young woodcock, it has been ascertained that large numbers of them undoubtedly spend the whole winter in England. Now, if Professor Boettger and Wilhelm Schuster are right in their conclusions, drawn from similar observations, as to the return of the conditions of the Tertiary period, and if the species of birds they observed used at an earlier date not infrequently to winter with us, a more extended protection for the woodcock ought, at any rate, to be introduced.
The continual levying of contributions on our colonies of sea-gulls, to the injury of a great number of the other species of birds that inhabit our sea-coasts, should also be greatly restricted. If this is not done we shall witness, within a period already in sight, a lamentable extermination of our shore- and sea-birds. And how grateful for protection many species show themselves! Wherever it is extended to them they enliven the landscape in the most pleasing way. So, too, it has been found that certain species of gulls have adapted themselves to a kind of nocturnal life in the neighbourhood of our great commercial ports.
I may here mention as standing in special need of protection, and as wonderful adornments of our German landscape, whose preservation should find an advocate in every thoughtful man—the buzzard, the kestrel, the hobby-hawk, both our varieties of kite, the crane, the heron, the white and the black stork, the crested grebe, the water-hen, and the coot. All these enliven and embellish the landscape to a conspicuous extent, and should not be sacrificed to selfish interests.
I knew an old gamekeeper, a native of the March of Brandenburg, who throughout the course of a long life had been taking care of a shooting estate, which had grown up with him, so to speak. He protected his wild creatures, and was delighted at having a colony of storks’ nests and a group of badger burrows in his woods. For long years he was able to preserve a primeval oak, the largest in the whole district, which in the year 1870 he named the “King’s Oak.”