Application for our leaflet is very satisfactory. The Staffordshire County Council has taken up distribution, and the farmers and parish authorities are again encouraged to begin sparrow clubs. I have experienced tremendous denunciations of my own brutality from the Rev. J. E. Walker. I enclose the second, as he purposes to relieve his mind further in the “Animal’s Friend.” Please not to return it. I returned his book with my compliments and thanks for sight of the same, and requested that should he desire to make any further remarks relative to the leaflet that he would not address them to me, but to you as my colleague in the work.
August 21, 1897.
In very little more than a week a new impression was needed to keep up to demand—and we are making way well with this second 5,000. Many of the applications are from centres—and great satisfaction is often expressed at the information being made available. The Agent-General for New Zealand asked for a supply, and Mr. Morley, Lord Spencer’s agent, is taking up the matter well; and as Lord Spencer appears to steadily set his face against sparrows, I hope that when he comes home we shall get some support there. A fair proportion of clergymen want copies for distribution to parishioners, or for sparrow clubs, which is satisfactory—and amongst all the great mass of applications there have not, I think, been more than five or six at all upholding P. domesticus, and these have been mostly quite trivial observations.
Mr. Morley was in a difficulty about how to keep the birds for counting, as in warm weather they got unpleasant. I suggested preserving their heads in salt and water—if I remember rightly this was how they managed the difficulty in South Australia. Altogether I think we are doing well—there are a good many inquiries as to the best methods of destroying the bird—but I always say that you will deal with this in your work. The good folks have not attacked me again personally by letter.
I should have liked to write just a short note to the “Field” to mention how well the matter has been taken up, but I did not feel sure whether you would wish me to do it? Would you think well of just mentioning the large demand yourself? On several days the applications ran to above a hundred letters. I am keeping the letters, for in some there is very practical observation as to the great injury done by sparrows—especially attacking corn on allotments.
August 22, 1897.
I am trying—if the thing be possible—to rout people out of the time-honoured old holes that they creep into—as the emigration of the sparrows—also the Maine and Auxerre story. These, I think, we have managed.
[The following is an extract from the “House Sparrow” pamphlet:—
“For many years mention has been made, by those who consider sparrow preservation desirable, of great disasters following on some not clearly detailed methods of extermination, or expulsion of the sparrow in the countries of Hungary and Baden, and also in the territory of Prussia; and, nearer our own time, in Maine, and near Auxerre in France. With regard to the three first named, a record will be found in our own ‘Times’ for August 21, 1861, p. 7.