It is known that for some time the mayfly has {266} been decreasing, and in places disappearing altogether from these Hampshire streams, and it is believed and said by some of those who are concerned at these changes that the swallow is accountable for them. I do not know whether they have invented this brilliant idea themselves or have taken it ready-made from the water-keeper. Probably the last, since he, the water-keeper, is apt to regard all creatures that come to the waters where his sacred fishes are with a dull, hostile suspicion, though in some cases he is not above adding to his income by taking a few trout himself--not indeed with the dry fly, which is useless at night, but with the shoe-net. In any case the question of exterminating the swallows in all the villages near the rivers has been seriously considered. Now, it is rather odd that this notion about the swallow--the martin is of course included--should have got about just when this bird has itself fallen on evil times and is decreasing with us. This decrease has, in all parts of the country best known to me, become increasingly rapid during the last few years, and is probably due to new and improved methods of taking the birds wholesale during migration in France and Spain. Putting that matter aside, I should like to ask those gentlemen who have decreed, or would like to decree, the abolition of the swallow in all the riverside villages, what they propose to do about the swift. [Sidenote: Mayfly and swift] One day last June (1902) I was walking with two friends by the Itchen, when a little below the village of Ovington we sat down to rest and to enjoy a gleam {267} of sunshine which happened to visit the world about noon that day. We sat down on a little wooden bridge over the main current and fell to watching the swifts, which were abundant, flying up and down just over our heads and, swift-like, paying no more heed to us than if we had been three wooden posts or three cows. We noticed that ephemeræ of three or four species were rising up, and, borne by a light wind, drifting down-stream towards us and past us; and after watching these flies for some time we found that not one of them escaped. Small and grey, or dun, or water-coloured and well-nigh invisible, or large and yellow and conspicuous as they rose and slowly fluttered over the stream, they were seen and snapped up, every one of them, by those fateful sooty-coloured demons of the air, ever streaming by on their swift scythe-shaped wings. Not a swallow nor a martin was in sight at that spot. It is plain, then, that if the mayfly is declining and dying out because some too greedy bird snatches its life before it can lay its eggs to continue the species, or drop upon the water to supply the trout with its proper succulent food, the swift and not the swallow is the chief culprit.