Barred Eagles

Local democracy has made itself felt in the best High Tory style in Norfolk, where a project to re-introduce Britain's largest birds of prey has been cancelled in the face of widespread support from people who don't matter. Anonymous sources, doubtless with nothing to hide or fear, claim that farmers expressed worry about white-tailed eagles helping to reduce the nation's consumption of red meat; that estate owners were worried about their watlands (and, since the birds originated in Poland, presumably their plumbing also); and that the Huntin' and Shootin' lobby had expressed a proprietary concern that their pheasants and partridge might fall prey to the avian migrants, which have not been present in Norfolk for two centuries and are far from being white all over. It would certainly be a tragedy should the numbers of game birds become so far reduced that they had to be hunted before being shot. Such an arrangement would be so unsuited to the well-bred Englishman as almost to approach the sporting.