Madam,

Bird populations in our gardens are certainly struggling. There are things we all do, which we needn’t, that really don’t help – weed killer, slug pellets, obsessive tidiness, concreting, strimming, impatience – and readers will be able to add their own observations.

Your correspondents on this subject are not calling for gunmen to shoot cats: rather, they wish to incite an unregulated slaughter of native wild birds.

Either expedient would be equally wrongheaded, equally futile and, you’d have to admit, a surprising way to express your profound love of nature.

We are reminded of a slogan from the Vietnam war – ‘Killing for Peace is like, err, Fornicating for Chastity’.

See to their food, give them unpoisoned habitat and birds you want will come, by and by, along with some you don’t. To adapt another old slogan, ‘Give Nature a Chance’.

Yours etc,

John Egan, Clarach.

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