THE balance of nature is a phrase often used. British grouseshooters and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds area mulling over the results of an experiment in a Scottish estate where, for five years, there has been a strict ban on shooting birds of prey. Not only has the stock of grouse fallen, but the results may show that there has been a loss of other birds such as larks, curlew and plover. Which makes you wonder what happened centuries ago, say, before organised shooting on the lines of the modern business cum sport existed.
It is argued that birds of prey can look after themselves; that peregrines can come into cities and successfully breed there. And have done so. To the detriment of pigeons only? It is a debate that will go on for a long time. But the skylark. Shelley's blithe spirit, pouring its full heart "in profuse strains of unpremeditated art" and Samuel Ferguson's dear thoughts "as I hear the sweet lark singing the clear air of the day"!
Even early in this century, small songbirds used to be served up in London clubs and eating houses. Wheatears were netted, and possibly others. But many Game Acts have been passed since then. That stalwart publication, the English Field, carried a letter in 1858 in which a correspondent described his experience in 1847, a winter of deep snow. Enormous flights of migratory birds took place, the writer says, chiefly larks and linnets but also blackbirds and thrushes and others. The correspondent tells of sweeping a space of ten yards by about four feet broad on his lawn and throwing down some oats and cabbage leaves.
"The larks pitched there eagerly, and it was as much as I could do to fire and load, pick up and change places fast enough to receive them as they came." In two days he bagged 552 larks, 13 fieldfares and 35 redwings. He says he could have killed thousands more. Presumably he would eat them and share out. He takes comfort in the fact that, as he writes, "On the whole line of flight, two or three miles inland, enormous damage was done by the larks, and whole turnip fields divested of every atom of green leaf".
Shooting 552 larks is as unpretty a picture of sport as you could imagine. Cabot tells us we have half a million breeding pairs, in Ireland. Maybe it's a question of distribution, but in the east and in the north this pair of ears hears less and less of the blithe spirit.