A VERY BEASTLY TRADE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19987, 30 June 1920, Page 6

A VERY BEASTLY TRADE.

An American law forbids the import of “bits of birds." That little Saxon phrase is to my ears and sense condemnation enough of what is much less happily called “ murderous millinery ” '—will doubtless be so called in the debate on the Plumage Bill (writes a contributor to the “Daily Mail"). It is peculiarly hateful to think of English men and women, esjiecially women, clamouring for “ bits of birds ” and backing a trade which exists by destruction of birds in the close season, the season when a “ truce of God ” is recognised all over the world towards animals with young. Wo are a race of- lipid naturalists. Even a German historian wrote years ago that no one could hope to know the English who had not read and understood Gilbert White's “ Selborne." Wo know mom about the habits- and ways of our living birds than any people in the world. I suppose our percentage of field naturalists is larger by at least ten in a hundred than any other people’s. Humanitarians are in about the same excess. The flash of silver wingg, the rippling fountain of song, the pencilled messages on eggs, mean supremo things to country dwellers. Wo build homes for birds when we are short of homes ourselves. Our literature, our newspapers, our daily talk, arc coloured throughout by our affection for the living bird, the “ mounted thrush,”’ the lark “ at heaven’s gate," “ true to the kindred points of heaven and home," the “ infinite passion” of the nightingale, the robin that “ bobs upon a stone, - ’ the curlew calling across the moorland. “ the black republic of the trees - ’ —one could go on quoting for a page and making poets of all dates, as I have mixed Shakespeare and Wordsworth without meaning it. Supposing that lovely heron which they call the egret homed with ua in this England—in this “swan’s nest in an ocean ” (you see even the Elizabethans must fetch their simile for England from the kingdefm of birds 1) We should beyond question regard oven the death of a male in winter as a crime. For nothing in natural history is more moving than the fond fidelity of these herons. They pair probably for hfo (personaly I believe the rooks do, and indeed most of the bigger birds). They perch side by side, intertwining their long necks in love knots; and when the young come they nurse them with a gracefulness of affection which inevitably suggests at every turn the best of what we mean by motherhood in our human sense. , This is the moment chosen for killing the birds. It is no good denying it. Friends of many of us have seen it and others have taken photographs of the parentless yotmg dying of starvation. Yet egret plumes are still popular with English women, and will be. People are thoughtless and ignorant, and the tondcrest in conscience and emotion are capable of endowing cruelty, merely because they know no better. We must therefore as a community stop the traffic. Arguments of this for or that against or the other Neither for nor against may all be .brushed aside as beside the issue, for in such a case our humanity, our national character, not to say reputation, are vitally affected. To encourage such traffic is a “ lie in the soul." We love living birds j wo haW bits of birds.