BIRDS TAME IN WAR TIME.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16020, 11 September 1915, Page 4 (Supplement)

BIRDS TAME IN WAR TIME.

Iv the summer number of Bird Notes and News, the organ of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, quotation is made. from a communication by M, Louis Tenier in the Bulletin of .the Societe Nation ale : • d'Acclimatation de France (May, 1915) on the remarkable lameness last winter of the migratory game birds. Winter immigrants, he observes, have usually" a tendency to familiarity with man, especially, birds of the water and marsh who are born .'far from the haunts of man, and therefore are not experienced, like the resident birds, in the need of avoiding such fimiliaritv. The absence of shooting during the past winter rendered them extraordinarily tame. " The curlews, so wild in ordinary times, allowed one to approach within several feet, and even stood before me. They would pick about on the sand, .almost "close to the feet of the sentinel of a military post on the coast. The sandpipers, plovers, and other little waders flew away onlv when forced, so to speak, and Settled not far away. As for the wild ducks and the teal, on the alluvial borders of the Bassebeme, they raised themselves from the pools, where they alighted in broad dav so near to any visitors that they could have been killed by throwing a stick at them. On a marsh of which I have the shooting, and which has not been shot since the war, the wild ducks seem no more wild than the domestic ones. Thev scrolled away tranquilly, without hurrying themselves, before those who pretended to wish to approach to take them." On the other hand, the non-migratory birds nave appeared as wild as ever. "The great familiarity of the birds of passage! at the end of the year 1914, is indispuV able, and seems to me to confirm the assertion of Toussenel, who maintained that the bmT desires only to ally:himself with roan. Unhappily man has decided otherwise. Sad to say, it .is only when we are at war with our own race that w e< consent to make peace with the birds "