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do with it. Uii the contrar}-, i tirnily beheve that, wtTe the gun substi- 

 tuted by a field glass, tramps through woods and fields were ten times 

 more conducive to the health and a hundred times more pleasurable. 



Can we not bring ourselves to admire the beautiful things in this 

 v/onderful world without feeling any desire to capture or destroy? 



Most of the hunters admit that they do not kill their game for the 

 little meat that they usually get out of it ; they do it neither for gain nor 

 for the pleasure of killing; it is simply a perverted love of Nature, the 

 same which prompts the child to pick the flower and after seeing it 

 wither, throw it away. 



While man and his gun are the great destroyers of large birds, the 

 smaller ones have many enemies among all classes of the animal king- 

 dom ; but since these enemies have existed for untold ages, the birds 

 have learned to guard against them, and have succeeded in holding their 

 own in spite of all of them. Nature itself is a cruel destroyer : a severe 

 rain and windstonrT may kill hundreds of nestlings ; a sudden rise in a 

 river, an inundation of lowland, will drown thousands of helpless young ; 

 winter's rigors reduce the number of the brave little birds who dare to 

 risk their lives, but Nature always finds means to make amends for 

 the damage which she does, may this be ever so severe. 



After the phenomenal period of glaciation throughout the south 

 Atlantic and Gulf states in February, 1895, only one-tenth of all the 

 Bluebirds of the Eastern United States returned to their breeding stands, 

 nine-tenths having perished. Gradually their numbers increased, and 

 today, nine years after the calamity, they are fully restored, Bluebirds 

 being as numerous as they ever were before. 



Fortunately this loveliest of birds is one of the few who have adapted 

 themselves so thoroughly to the new conditions that civilization imposes, 

 and they have found so much favor in the eyes of all, that their future 

 seems to be safe enough as far as human interference is concerned. I 

 only wish I could say as much of many more species, but I cannot. 



Next to man there is no other enemy so diligent in the destruction 

 of bird life as the house cat, because of its universal distribution and 

 unchecked activity. Few people know that the cat is the arch-enemy of 

 all ground-feeding and ground-building birds ; if it does not get the 

 parent it is sure to get the young ones before they can fly. Many of 

 our song birds are ground-builders, but they invariably disappear from 

 neighborhoods where cats can roam. The Nightingale, the renowned 

 songster of Europe, is a ground-builder. Its steady decrease, in spite 

 of all protection, is mainly due to the cat. Some dogs are nearly as 

 bad as cats in this regard. While visiting a large private park, where 



H-6 . 



