8 SOME USEFUL AUSTRALIAN BIRDS. 



The Necessity for Effective Administration. 



The movement before the lovers of animal and bird life is to have the 

 protection acts administered as the framers intended, and further still, to 

 have all the State laws dealing with the matter embodied in a comprehensive 

 federal act. It is only a few years ago that the citizens of the United 

 States arrived at the same conclusion ; their laws were in even a more 

 complicated condition than ours are at the present time, for not only did 

 each State (and there are forty-eight of them) have a different game and 

 bird protection act within its boundaries, but in some cases several counties 

 of a single State had different regulations and close seasons, so that the 

 unscrupulous pot-hunter could step across the boundary line and kill all he 

 wanted with impunity. The laws of the United States are conside'ed perfect 

 now, in theory at any rate ; but it is not so much from what they are doing 

 now as from what was done in spite of the old acts, that we can learn some 

 lessons. All their big game — bison and deer in their countless thousands — 

 have vanished off the great plains in one generation. Mr. Mitchell, of 

 Victoria, Texas, who came to the " Lone Star State " fifty years ago, told me 

 that he could remember the time when there were more deer on the prairie 

 than there are cattle at the present time. You have only to take up the 

 works of any of the waters of thirty or forty years ago to read how prolific 

 life was on those rich lands. What has become of the countless millions of 

 the passengpr pigeons that used to take their flight every year over the North 

 American forests, and which comprised one of the regular food supplies of 

 the settlers'? They are reduced to a few isolated flocks now nesting in the 

 Michigan woods. 



When the fashion set in for sea-birds' wings to trim ladies' hats some 

 twenty years ago, there were countless flocks of that beautiful tern known as 

 the Sea Swallow on all the sands and islands from Cape Cod to Southern 

 [Florida ; to-day there are only two small islands in the north where a few of 

 these birds can be found nesting, and the Government keeps paid'wardens on 

 these islands for their protection. All these great hosts have been slaughtered 

 to deck ladies' hats with their plumage. In our own State what is more 

 ■common than to see wanton shooting of birds of every kind? 



The question then arises, who is to administer an effective fauna protection 

 act ? And this question has been answered by the only two great agricultural 

 countries that have taken up the protection in a practical manner — -the 

 Kingdom of Hungary and the United States of America. 



The United States has solved the matter by making this necessary 

 protection a branch of the Department of Agriculture ; and the officials of 

 the Department, in conjunction with the oflicers of the Forestry Departments, 

 look after birds and beasts, and study the many side issues that come up 

 through a more or less artificial condition when absolute protection is enforced. 

 About 1858 several workers began to examine the stomachs of birds ; and in 

 1880 Professor S. A. Forbes, of Illinois, tabulated all the work done in this 



