Throughout the Rev. White’s letters are recorded moments when he shot birds, indeed it might seem sometimes as if he carried his gun on all his walks. To the mind of the modern conservationist this seems unforgivable but in an age before ‘protected species’ and the R.S.P.B. it must be stated that his reason for doing so was invariably so he could take home the the corpse to study – detailed study of plumage, contents of gut, small anatomical features and the like. There is, as far as I know, no reference to an ‘eye-glass’ so, although he clearly had very good eyesight, this might have been his main way of studying birds anatomies.
A number of high profile figures in the 20th century have, during the course of their lives, changed from being hunters to conservationists, the best known to me being Sir (after 1970s) Peter Scott (1909-1989), only son of Robert Falcon Scott of ‘race to the South Pole’ fame 1912. One of Peter’s ‘sporting’ interests as a young man was wildfowling (shooting ducks and geese in wetland environments) but, overwhelmed by the beauty of his prey, he abandoned the gun. One of his great achievements, one of a number, was to co-found the Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Gloucestershire just after the Second World War – the photo above being taken there in 1954 (from website).
Today’s shooting parties hardly deserve the title ‘sportsmen’, with cartridges filled with many pellets that fan-out on firing and ‘up-an-over’ repeater shotguns it must be harder to miss than to hit the target! Of course they argue on the grounds of country sports and rural tradition. Most ‘game’ is wounded in flight and, most likely, it is the impact on falling to the ground that kills them (this paragraph represents a personal opinion, as a teenager I too had an air-gun and a single-barrel 4-10 shot gun). Would the Rev. Gilbert White approve of killing birds for ‘sport’, who knows?