AND BRITISH COLUMBIAN.
The most ideal district for naturalization that ever I saw, not excluding Ireland, is Vancouver Island. I shall never forget the contrast of coming down from the Selkirks (where the only bird. I saw was " the fool partridge," the handsome but sluggish percher of the fir woods) and passing straight over to Vancouver Island. The place was alive with game of surprising variety. Naturalized partridges and pheasants flourished alongside the native birds, especially duck and water birds. On the most attractive farm I visited a wild mallard was bringing off a clutch in a little wooden shed, where she 'seemed quite to enjoy visitors. The mixture of river and lake, of wood and farm, of cultivated and wild ground with a climate free from extremes, supplies most animals, from man to game, with their optimum for a pleasant life. The chief enemy of birds and of man, as poultry- keeper, in that paradise is the carrion crow ; and this same assassin appears to come second to frost as the pheasants' Pie in Ontario. Incidentally it is only the carrion crow that prevents greater-crested grebe and perhaps other water birds from nesting on our own suburban water reservoirs. It must, perhaps, be confessed in regard to Ireland that the comparative scarcity of pheasants in very suitable country is most directly due to the human enemy.
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