Man and Birds. R. K. Murton

witnessed the worst excesses, with the ruthless slaughter of any predatory bird or mammal, and nothing was allowed to stand in the way of prodigious bags. William Cobbett in Rural Rides (1830) was contemptuous of these so-called sportsmen – especially those who claimed big bags. ‘A professed shot is almost always a disagreeable brother sportsman. He must have in the first place a head rather of the emptiest to pride himself upon so poor a talent.’ In 1903 the Game Rearers Annual stated: ‘The hooded crows are most difficult to destroy and unless poison is used (which, by the way, is illegal) they cannot be successfully coped with. Where poison is used it is generally placed in the eyes of a dead sheep, which usually provides a fatal lure to the hoodies.’ So much for the early Bird Protection Laws. Even today it is proving a slow uphill struggle to educate the more recalcitrant gamekeepers into accepting that such actions do not automatically improve game prospects, but there has been much progress.

      Increasing demands for shooting at first led to the augmentation of pheasant stocks by hand rearing, a technique which has grown enormously in the last fifty years owing to a break up of large estates, and to the formation of shooting syndicates and the attraction of city business men, helped by improvements in transport and more leisure. This in turn has led to the scientific study of game-birds and the elevation of game biology to a highly respected place in the wider field of wild life conservation and management, and was heralded by the grouse inquiry (Lovat 1911) already mentioned in the preface. Following the growth of ecology, the Imperial Chemical Industries, Game Research Station (later Eley Game Advisory Station) was formed in 1933. Its ultimate aim was of course to improve prospects for selling cartridges, but under the direction of A. D. Middleton (himself a vital force in the growth of ecology at Oxford) it has set the standards for field ecology in a much wider sense, and made possible the formation of the progressive Game Research Association in 1960, which has subsequently become the Game Conservancy since 1969. In the meantime, the study of grouse was recommenced when the Nature Conservancy inaugurated its Unit of Grouse and Moorland Ecology in 1959 at Aberdeen University. One hopes that the study and amenity of game will become even more integrated within the broader concepts of wild life management in Britain.

      But we have moved on too far in time if we are to appreciate what man has done to the land as a habitat for birds. The rate of tree felling increased as the Tudor squires enclosed waste, common and woods, a process that accelerated after 1660 when the Government relinquished its opposition to private agreements negotiated by the landlords. All the same the pattern of the countryside as we see it today had only emerged in south-east England. Even by the eighteenth century there was abundant wilderness, about a quarter of the country being heath and moor, and much of the remainder was medieval with open fields of meadow and arable land adjoining gorse-covered common pasture; by 1760 less than a quarter million acres had been enclosed. One can picture the goose-girl tending her flock idly watching the goldfinches on thistle clumps or stonechats singing from some furze. Bustards were still stalking the chalk wolds of eastern England, white-tailed eagles were nesting on the Isle of Wight.

      The big rural transformation came between 1750 and the General Enclosure Act of 1845, most of the open fields going in the sixty years of Farmer George III. Most of the earlier enclosures had been of common, waste and woodland, expensive to achieve but less disturbing for the community in that the old peasant system could still be based on self-sufficiency. The enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were based on economic necessity and were a national policy that brought much suffering and ill-will. In less than a century, they transformed peasant England into modern England. There were many protagonists. Pioneers of modern farming like Arthur Young, who did much to disseminate the latest results of experiments and supported all the agencies like farmers’ clubs, ploughing matches and sparrow clubs which helped to diffuse ideas, claimed that enclosure brought more employment in fence mending and turnip husbandry, even though sheep were lost. Young was enthusiastic but he was inflexible and lacked judgement and others were less enchanted:

      The fault is great in man or woman,

      Who steals a goose from off a common,

      But what can plead that man’s excuse,

      Who steals a common from a goose.

      (The Tickler Magazine, 1 February 1821.)

      John Clare in ‘The Village Minstrel’ sums up some of the changes that must have grieved the ornithologist:

      There once were days, the woodman knows it well,

      Where shades e’en echoed with the singing thrush;

      There once were hours, the ploughman’s tale can tell,

      When morning’s beauty wore its earliest blush,

      How woodlarks carol’d from each stumpy bush;

      Lubin himself has mark’d the soar and sing:

      The thorns are gone, the wood-lark’s song is hush’d,

      Spring more resembles winter now than spring,

      The shades are banish’d all – the birds have too to wing.

      The population of England and Wales slowly increased from about 4 million in 1603 to 5½ million in 1714, held in check by a high death-rate. The explosion occurred with the Industrial Revolution, from 9 million in 1801 to 18 million in 1851. For a while the rate of increase was held down by a high urban mortality, through epidemics of cholera and other diseases of overcrowding. Improved hygiene in the latter half of the nineteenth century removed this check and the rate of natural increase was only halted in the 1920s (it fell from 10.4 in 1921 to 3.9 in 1931) as a direct consequence of contraception but by now there were 40 million people in England and Wales, reaching 52 million in 1959.

      These demographic statistics serve two functions here. They illustrate for the human population some of the principles to be discussed in the next chapter in relation to birds. In particular, although the birth-rate was high in the seventeenth century (as it was earlier) the population was relatively stable due to a high reciprocal death-rate. Population size increased in response to improved environmental resources during the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions. The data also emphasise the pressures that man had come to inflict on the land and, by inference, on its wild life. In the nineteenth century, bustard, bittern, avocet, ruff, black tern and roseate tern vanished, and large birds of prey like the goshawk became rare. Loss or fragmentation of their habitat was not the sole reason because some have since returned, and man’s greed must be blamed to a large extent: there were those to whom the rarity of a bird made its capture imperative.

      Those people living near large colonies of nesting birds have for long been able to harvest them for food. Fisher and Peterson have related how ancient sea-fowling communities in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes and St Kilda had evolved a rational level of exploitation of the seabird colonies of gannets, fulmars and auks, ensuring that sufficient eggs or young birds were left to prevent declines in the future harvest. By trial and error they have found that about half the auks’ eggs can be collected, as these species lay repeats, but fulmars do not and are better left alone to hatch their young. In a valuable review dealing with the exploitation of the eggs of wild birds throughout the world, Cott has emphasised how the factors governing the utilisation of wild birds’ eggs are accessibility, palatability and availability. The first two are rarely limiting, but the size and concentration of the potential crop is important. Cott found that with the exception of the eggs of certain boobies, cormorants and pelicans, which are rank and fishy to a cultivated palate, there is a broad correlation between palatability, size and colonial grouping. For reasons which will become clear in Chapter 2, most adult birds and their eggs can withstand considerable cropping without the replacement potential being adversely affected, and, as with all wild food resources, the object is to achieve the highest annual cropping rate without detriment to the maintenance of a sustained yield. In the late nineteenth century this level was exceeded in species after species, with the same thoughtless greed with which the Victorians exploited other natural resources and the colonies. In 1884, 130,000 guillemot eggs were collected from Bempton (at the time, tons of eggs were sent to Leeds where the albumen was used in the manufacture of patent leather); in 1840, 44,000 black-headed gull eggs were taken from Scoulton Mere, and 89,600 puffin’s eggs were taken from