THE BIRD WATCHER How necessary such watchers and such guardians
have become experiences of the last week or two have shown me more emphatically than ever before. Along the Norfolk coast, where rare birds chiefly congregate, three types of sportsmen, with apologies for the word, flourish perpetually. The peace of the Spits and the marshes is daily punctuated by the noise of their guns, and during one morning of observation I had the ill-fortune to have ocular evidence of each sort of activity. First there is the " long-shore gunner," as he used to be called. Once he had his justification, he was indeed of a fine type : a local character, often a marvelously good obser- ver, who made a living by shooting geese, duck and other wild fowl, in direct succession to the natives of the days of Hereward and earlier. One of these men, of a less honest caste, once asked me if I would like to buy a woodcock ; and produced a perfectly good curlew from his bag Such men doubtless still exist ; but in general—or such is my recent experience, they have been displaced by callous youths, such as one has seen on the continent, who go out chiefly for the fun, as they hold it, of killing. On the edge of the Norfolk sanctuaries they are now shooting any bird they see ; linnets, seagull, redshank or what not.
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