108 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



take care of the crops and the fruit trees and the forest trees of 

 this country. 



The first picture I am to show you was made by a man in 

 Maryland, who is an ardent sportsman. A pair of eagles made 

 a nest in an old tree near his house a few years ago. His first 

 impulse was to take his gun and kill the birds and have their 

 skins upholstered and set up in his .den, where he has many 

 others; but he thought better of it, and instead of that he went 

 down there and built a scaffold in another tree, thirty feet away 

 from the nest, got up there with a camera and spent the better 

 part of six days, going every morning and staying nearly all 

 day trying to get a picture of them. Finally, on the sixth day 

 about noon, when the conditions were just right, the male parent 

 bird came with a full grown rabbit in its talons. The man 

 pressed the bulb and got this beautiful picture, and he says he 

 would not give that negative for the skins of any dozen birds 

 he has mounted and set up in his library. And many other 

 men who have substituted the camera for the gun have found 

 the same intense pleasure in it that this man has found. 



Here is what the gunner gets if he can shoot well enough 

 (showing a pair of dead quail). He brings home a few mangled, 

 bloody, lifeless birds. He has had some fun in killing them. 

 He and his family may have a passing satisfaction in eating 

 them, but if this man has the right kind of a conscience it will 

 punish him ever after for having destroyed such useful and 

 beautiful birds. The quail, the ruffed grouse, the prairie 

 chicken, the robin, meadow lark, the blackbird, and fifty other 

 species of birds in this country live all summer long on insects, 

 and many of them live all winter on weed seeds, the seeds of 

 noxious weeds that you farmers have to fight all summer. 



Mrs. Margaret M. Nice of the Massachusetts State Uni- 

 versity has been studying the quail in domestication for many 

 years. She has counted out and weighed out the food to each 

 bird and has kept careful records of what each one ate. She 

 has arrived at the conclusion that each adult quail eats seventy- 

 five thousand bugs and worms each summer and over six mil- 

 lion weed seeds each winter. And yet, strange as it may seem, 

 there are men all over this country who, every time we intro- 

 duce a bill to afford better protection for the quail in any Legis- 

 lature, protest against it and beg their Representatives to kill it; 

 and in many cases they succeed in defeating our measures. On 

 the other hand, there are good-natured farmers everywhere who 



