There can be no doubt that the decline of this species, which, on account of its furze-loving habits, must always be restricted to limited areas, is directly attributable to the greed of private collectors, who are all bound to have specimens--as many as they can get--both of the bird and its nest and eggs. Its strictly local distribution made its destruction a comparatively easy task. In 1873 Gould wrote in his large work on British Birds: "All the commons south of London, from Blackheath and Wimbledon to the coast, were formerly tenanted by this little bird; but the increase in the number of collectors has, I fear, greatly thinned them in all the districts near the metropolis; it is still, however, very abundant in many parts of Surrey and Hampshire." It did not long continue "very abundant." Gould was shown the bird, and supplied with specimens, by a man named Smithers, a bird-stuffer of Churt, who was at that time collecting Dartford warblers and their eggs for the trade and many private persons, on the open heath and gorse-grown country that lies between Farnham and Haslemere. Gould in the work quoted, adds: "As most British collectors must now be supplied with the eggs of the furze wren, I trust Mr Smithers will be more sparing in the future." So little sparing was he, that when he died, but few birds were left for others of his detestable trade who came after him.
Three or four years ago I got in conversation with a heath-cutter on Milford Common, a singular and brutal-looking fellow, of the half-Gypsy Devil's Punch-Bowl type, described so ably by Baring-Gould in his Broom Squire. He told me that when he was a boy, about thirty-five years ago, the furze wren was common in all that part of the country, until Smithers' offer of a shilling for every clutch of eggs, had set the boys from all the villages in the district hunting for the nests. Many a shilling had he been paid for the nests he found, but in a few years the birds became rare; and he added that he had not now seen one for a very long time.
In Clark's Kennedy's Birds of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire we get a glimpse of the furze wren collecting business at an earlier date and nearer the metropolis. In 1868 he wrote:--"The only locality in the two counties in which this species is at all numerous, is a common in the vicinity of Sunninghill, where it is found breeding every summer, and from whence a person in the neighbourhood obtains specimens at all times of the year, with which to supply the London bird-stuffers."