Agricultural Progress When the binder had been in use for
thirty or forty years, people began to say that they heard the corncrake less often. Shortly after the tractor came on the scene, with its half-a-dozen implements that have got to be minded by a man looking back over his shoulder, it seemed that the peewit was less common in a district where I had known it to be common. Now I read that the ingenuity of the agricultural engineer may be reducing, the partridge population. The grass-drier is to blame, it seems. because the farmer can harvest his hay green, two or three weeks earlier than he used to do so. Two or three weeks in early summer means that the partridge is still brooding when the reaper comes. A little later and the chicks would have hatched and have had a chance to run. One other bit of progress is blamed for the absence of partridges in large numbers—the habit of spraying weed-killers that have a toxic effect upon the birds. Whatever the truth of the theories, there has been talk of shortening the partridge-shooting season, which should help considerably.
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