290 ■ MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



and brute and whose liigliest sport is bloody destruction to liarmless 

 feathered sono-gters. 



Kow we have a law in Missouri and a ^ood one to protect g-ame 

 and birds. All it needs is a strict enforcement, this will intimidate the 

 heartless and educate the thou^i^htless. This society can do much by 

 calling- attention through the press. I understand the law requires the 

 judges to give it in charge to grand jurors each term of their courts. 



Let us take a hasty glance at some of the birds most useful accord- 

 ing to autliorities. 



All night birds are eminently beneficial. Owls and night-hawks 

 destroy multitudes of mice and young rabbits. Indeed, but for some 

 such destroying agents, the rabbits alone would increase beyond power 

 of calculation. Mr. Samuels of Massachusetts writing a few years ago, 

 remarks of the whipporwill, "they subsist almost entirely on moths, 

 which they destroy in great numbers. He adds that, in some parts of 

 the U.nited States an absurd notion prevails, that if a whipporwill sings 

 around the door of a dwelling it forewarns the death of some member 

 of the family, and this has caused the destruction of multitudes of 

 these most useful birds ; and that it is incredible to what an extent this 

 absurd idea is carried. Any wide-spread belief instead of being sneered 

 at or laughed at should be investigated. The absurd idea is more gen- 

 eral than I had supposed. So far as my observation goes the whippor- 

 will is a very shy, wild, retiring bird. Yet it may have such strange 

 locality, as phrenologists call it, that, having once laid an egg there or 

 thereabouts 'twill stick. Multitudes of these birds are within my hear- 

 ing of moonlight nights, and have been for almost 20 years, during 

 their season and yet I have never had a sight of but one, that one some 

 few years ago nested in a near neighbors house yard, and persisted in 

 staying there and singing for some weeks, in spite of many efforts made 

 to drive it away by the resident Mr. W. K. Springer. Strange to say, 

 his little bo3^, soon after the bird appeared there, sickened and died, 

 although it is one of the healthiest neighborhoods in the world, and no 

 other disease was there prevaling. This one thing has forever con- 

 firmed the superstition in some minds, farther investigation may prove 

 to us that it is a very common thing for these birds to nest near houses 

 and thus do away with a very strange superstition. It perhaps rests 

 on the well known fallacy of logic — [Post Hoe, Propter Hoe], a fallacy 

 that secretly rules mankind, namely, that because a thing happened 

 after another thing the first thing caused it. 



The yellow and black-billed cuculidie and all wood-pecking birds 

 rank among the most useful. They destroy billions of caterpillars and 

 tree borers. These can not be too much encouraged. 



