Native Birds.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20491, 9 March 1932, Page 10

Native Birds.

It is pleasant to find a Government Department in such times as these remembering the claims of the birds. Even if the facts are not quite so agreeable as that —if the Native Birds Protection Society has done the remembering and the Internal Affairs Department the obeying —it is creditable to obey in so good a cause. For it is not enough merely to issue regulations and fix penalties. If our native birds are to be saved it will be by the co-operation of good citizens rather than by the punishment of the less good; and sportsmen can be very good when their imaginations are roused. It is considerably in the birds' favour in Canterbury that the English tradition is still strong, especially the tradition of the leisured Englishman, who, though he may love a gun, has always found live creatures interesting as well as dead ones. But it is necessary also to face the other fact that sportsmen are not the only people who shoot. At Easter more than at any other time of the year the bush is invaded by hundreds who never in other circumstances carry a firearm; and the rarer a bird is the more difficult it is for most people to l'esist the i temptation to bring it down.