All this killing business. If you find mouse droppings and torn packets of biscuits or pasta or rice in a drawer or cupboard, you clean up the mess and set traps. If you discover new holes in the ground near your kitchen door, and see a rat, you reach for a rat poison, being careful that no other creature can get access to it. A pipe is often used. These are both backed by fairly sound health reasons. But if your garden is bouncing with magpies, do you get all hot and bothered about their habit of raiding the nests of smaller birds and stealing eggs or nestlings?
A regular correspondent, Arthur Reynolds, who lives at Blackrock, Co Dublin, has been plagued by them. When he moved a half lifesize stone figure away from the terrace, the magpies swarmed in "and are here all day." The bird table which he made, with a view to defeating their wiles, succeeded only until one cute member of the flock found out how to get in. His Mark 2 table, of which he sends a photo, consists of a top disc 13 1/2 inches in diameter, while the lower one, on which he puts the seeds, is 8 1/2 inches. And between the two, the gap is only 1 3/4 inches, thereby keeping out the bigger birds.
Arthur then goes on to follow up the recent chat about eating pigeons by proposing a campaign to persuade people to eat magpies. Then there would be fewer of them. Mrs Beeton has no word to say about magpies, good or bad. But, on the same pigeons, Arthur has a good story. When he was in Cairo some years ago on business, he noted that the wife of a big businessman fed pigeons on the balcony of her beautiful penthouse every morning - and the reason was, so that she could crop the flock every now and then for the table. She said she only gave them just enough seed to keep them coming back. They did their basic feeding in the delta fields.
From denouncing magpies, of course, you go on to bewailing the destruction of small birds by sparrow hawks and other predators. Many a time, at one bird feeding centre (several devices), there comes a fluttering of feathers as the hawk descends for its dinner - a finch, a great tit, a robin.
And sporting interests in Britain are pointing out that the preservation of certain predatory birds is causing havoc among the grouse and other game, birds. Something must be done. Employment is being endangered etc. The balance of Nature is a difficult subject.