Lancaster Daily Intelligencer

DESTRUCTION OF THE BIRDS
"Science" Takes Up the Cudgels for the War-
blers of Wood and Field
From the Baltimore Sun.

The entire number of the last supplement
to "Science" is taken up with a review of the
wholesale destruction of bird life in the
United States and its injurious effects upon
agriculture. The indiscriminate slaughter of
game birds is prohibited by state laws, and is
zealously guarded against by numerous pro-
tective associations, but entire freedom is
given to everybody who owns or can borrow
a gun to destroy all others wantonly and at
will. This species of "gunning" is the sport
of many men and of innumerable small
boys, who add to their pride as successful
shots the pastime of bird's nesting, and thus,
in one way, destroy bird life, and, in the
other, the life that might have been. Not
only are robins, meadow larks and black
birds exposed for sale in some of our mar-
kets, but many kinds of thrushes, warblers,
vireos and waxwings. The number of
birds shot for the ornithological de-
partments of public museums is in-
finitesimally small as compared with
the multitude destroyed in other ways.
But the greatest destruction of late years has
been caused by the sacrifice of birds to fash-
ion for hat ornamentation and personal decor-

ation, the number being computed at not less
than five millions of birds "slaughtered for
this one purpose each year. Besides these
forty thousand terns are known to have
been killed on Cape Cod in a single season for
exportation, and a million of rails and reed-
birds in a single month on the waters of the
Delaware. "The swamps and marshes of
Florida are well-known to have recently be-
come depopulated of their egrets and herons,
while the state at large has been for years a
favorite slaughter ground for the mill-
ions of emissaries who are now carrying
on the same wholesale warfare against the
birds at various points along the whole gulf
coast." The great multitude of our small
birds against whom a constant warfare is
waged, numbering many hundreds of
species, are the natural checks upon the
whole brood of insect pests. Wherever the
birds have decreased there has been noted an
increase of insects, especially of those kinds
injurious to agriculture. The great diminu-
tion of song birds in the neighborhood of
large cities is complained of by one writing,
who says: "A garden without flowers,
childhood without laughter, an orchard with-
out blossoms, are the analogues of a country
without song birds." But leaving the esthe-
tics of the subject out of the question, and
without affirming as a fact that "the United
States are going straight to that desert condi-
tion," it is nevertheless true that the im-
mense yearly destruction of our birds of all
kinds is thinning them out, and that wherever
they are getting scarce there is a rapid in-
crease of insect pests injurious to vegetation.
We had occasion to call attention some time
ago to a statement of our correspondent on
Cobb's Island with respect to the almost com-
plete extermination of the many thousands
of gulls and terns and shore-breeding birds
that were formerly found on that island, one
contract being made on account of a Paris
millinery firm for forty thousand skins. On
the coast of Long Island, where a few years
since, were thousands upon thousands of
terns, there is now scarcely one to be seen.
All the fine plumaged birds are sharing the
same fate. A New York taxidermist states
that he had in his shop thirty thousand skins
of humming birds, orioles, warblers, wood-
peckers, purple grackles, red-winged black-
birds and snow buntings, prepared for milli-
nery purposes. The pelicans, terns, gulls and
herons, as Mr. Sennett points out, are "the
scavengers of the shoal waters of our shores
as the buzzards are on land. The smaller
inland birds keep down injurious in-
sects."

A farmer in Michigan writes that
"the destruction of birds has been car-
ried on there to such an extent that
it is hardly possible to raise any fruit, even
the grapes as well as the apples being too
wormy for use or sale." Frequent protests
have been made in many quarters against
this indiscriminate slaughter. Some of the
states have enacted bird laws, but they are
not properly enforced as yet. In New
Jersey so many complaints recently reached
the legislature of the destruction of song
and show birds that a bill for the protection
of birds was introduced and passed with only
one negative vote. The American Ornithol-
ologists' union, which has its headquarters in
New York, has taken up this subject of bird
slaughter, and has prepared the draft of a
bird law for general adoption throughout the
United States and Canada. In England two
societies, under the sanction of the queen,
have been organized to put a stop to the
wearing of birds as personal ornaments, and
to aid in the preservation of birds. An ap-
peal is made in Science to the women of the
country in behalf of the birds, and the
American Ornithologists' union invites the
hearty co-operation of all persons or societies
who may be interested in their protection.
So far as the use of birds as personal orna-
ments is concerned, it is a fashion that will
soon die out of itself. But their destruction
from mischief or wantonness, or as a small
but favorite kind of sport, will still go on
unless proper laws are made to prevent it, or
until a better knowledge of their usefulness
is instilled into the minds of the people.