OUR EGYPTIAN BIRDS.
A special effort is being made to save the lives of the warblers, especially wheatears, redstarts, swallows and quail, that are now limed and netted in great quantity on the shores of N. Africa, not least by the Nile Delta. The Duchess of Portland, as president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, has written to the Egyptian Government, which is, on the whole sympathetic. Indeed, suitable laws are already on, the statute book, but there is no pretence of their observance. The question is even more important for the agriculture of Egypt, which is particularly liable to insect plagues, than to Europe, where every country owes wealth
to the warbler and summer migrant. Since Many of the most beneficial birds cover some 4,000 miles in their migrant journeys, it is obvious that their protection needs international co-operation. It is in such departments of common life— perhaps more than in politics—that a League of Nations his a proper scope. But it is easier to get laws passed than to see them administered. Even in England, which leads- the
way, a man confessed the other day to trapping 300 gold- finches in one field ; and hundreds of tree creepers are still :aught by limed wires.
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