SAVE THE BIRDS

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 102, 27 October 1932, Page 4

SAVE THE BIRDS

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—lt is a promising sign, and one that is all too rare in current journalism, to find the subject o£ bird-lore sympathetically dealt with in the correspondence land editorial columns of tho most influential organs of the New Zealand Press. Though many of the views and instances expressed are of a controversial or conflicting nature, the fact that they are expressed and discussed is a heartening earnest of gradual progress toward a state of '"bird-mindedness" which has a peculiar though possibly unrecognised I value in a community whose fate or fortune is to be decided by the degree of success achieved in field pursuits (without a gun). This being so, it behoves every well-wisher of New Zealand to acquire an interest in local bird-life, and to strive, so far as is consistent with personal idiosyncrasy and the fragmentary evidence available, to assess the value of birds as a very real and effective aid to the vital industries of this country, and to protect such birds accordingly. At the risk of stating a commonplace, I should say, first place to the humble starling. So much for the utilitarian aspect. From what might be called the sentimental point of view, a more magnanimous spirit is due toward birds regardless of alleged destructiveness or origin. Birds are happily immune from and unconscious of national prejudice; a blight which is unfortunately spreading throughout the nations of the world to-day, and from the most sordid motives. It is hardly credible, for instance, but is nevertheless regrettably true that in New Zealand, and in "these enlightened times," there are persons so obsessed by the "exclusivist" complex as to malign those "ethereal minstrels," the skylark and the thrush, two creatures of God which among the hills and hollows of Wellington daily enliven . the existence of many unfortunates still susceptible to the charms of bird-music free and untrammelled; relief drudges whose thoughts are thus diverted occasionally from the tragedy of the ever-present reflection: "What mail has made of man/—l am, etc.,

ANGLO-ARGENTINE,