CAPRI AND AFTER.
When Dr. Alex Munthe wrote of the plight of the birds of Italy in San Michele he builded better than he knew : he moved the heart of the Duce to consecrate Capri as a sanctuary for birds. When the Duce made the order, he too, we may hope and perhaps expect, will have built better than he knew : in this way. The Egyptian Government is, I understand, meditating the protection of the quail ; and the best way is Mussolini's : the definition of areas of sanctuary in the midst of a migratory route. Again, there is a growing demand for bird protection among French farmers and here and there small sanctuaries have been appointed. Them is one at St. Raphael in the south of France, small, it is true, and so little guarded that I wandered about it for a long while and failed altogether in my endeavours to discover any guardian or for that matter any birds Protection, to be of full use must be internationally co-operative, since birds cover up to 4,000 miles in their migrations ; and—to speak roughly—the migrants are generally the most economically useful ; the stimulus is, or may be, the harmful insect. The millennium will have arrived in Europe when Italy, France, Spain and Egypt unite in protecting, if only here and there, the shores of the Mediterranean. We might take a hand at the Rock of Gibraltar. Spain is a natural paradise, but an artificial hell for most wild birds.
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