Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 115 



The time was, and only a few years ago, when every man 

 and every boy when he saw a chipmunk, or a woodchuck, or a 

 rabbit, or a gray squirrel, wanted to either get a gun and kill it 

 or to shy a rock at it; but that has changed. There are a lot of 

 people today who are feeding those little things, inviting them 

 to come and live around their home; and they do it. An old 

 man chopping wood near a village made the acquaintance of 

 several chipmunks, and they soon learned to come every day 

 and help him eat his lunch. He would always share it with 

 them and he found a great deal more fun in it, he said, than he 

 would have had in killing them. 



You have all heard and read many times the^ story of the 

 slaughter of the beautiful white herons and egrets in the southern 

 states and in South America for their plumes, so I need not take 

 your time to tell it here; but it is one of the great crimes of the 

 nineteenth and twentieth centuries that those beautiful birds 

 which could be found in millions all over our southern states a 

 few years ago have been practically exterminated. 



I said something to you about the prairie chicken. You 

 don't have it here, perhaps, but in the northern part of your 

 State where there are vast prairies. That bird, when I first 

 commenced to travel through this State, thirty years ago, could 

 be seen in thousands from the trains; but not so today. Still, 

 if you would make a law absolutely stopping all killing of them 

 and of all other birds, prohibiting men from taking guns in the 

 fields or forests at any time for five years, and then send away 

 and get a few pairs of prairie chickens and put them out here, 

 you would soon have hundreds of them on every farm and they 

 would be eating up your grasshoppers. 



Here (showing a picture) is another bird that is a menace to 

 the good birds of the country, the crow. He is one of the serious 

 problems in protecting our good birds. We cannot legislate too 

 much against him. So long as men are allowed to shoot I wish 

 you would induce them to devote their time to the crow and the 

 English sparrow, the red squirrel and the prowling cat. 



A few years ago the gull was hunted for millinery purposes, 

 just as other birds were. Gull wings and whole gull skins were 

 very popular for trimming women's hats, and the state game 

 warden of North Carolina told me that to his certain knowledge 

 more than fifteen thousand small gulls were killed on Currituck 

 Sound in one winter and the skins shipped to milliners in the 

 north. 



