Our Responsibility 



A PAGE FROM THE BIRDS' BOOK OF SNOW 

 By MABEL OSGOOD V/RIGHT 



THERE are very few pleasures that do not carry with them a responsi- 

 bility in proportion to their keenness, and 1 doubt if many of those who 

 are bird lovers and protectionists in theory, really understand the 

 responsibility entailed in living up to their creed. 



The Yearbook of Bird-life is written in many volumes, and its illustrations 

 glow with all the colors of earth and sky and sea. Its stories are both brief 

 tragedies and joyous serials of comedy and melodrama; then, after it all passes 

 to the broken strains of the songs of the fall migration, comes a sequel as it 

 were, the record of those few hardy clansmen that find it possible to stay with 

 us through the shut-in months. A thin volume this, bound in white and black, 

 threaded with random ribbons of sky-blue with red and gold of sunsets and 

 sun-ups for markers — The Birds' Book of Snow, which we must read carefully 

 if we would intelligently lure these brave hearts to take shelter in our gardens 

 or in the windbreaks of evergreens; and if they accept the invitation, treat 

 them consistently. 



This page of The Birds' Book of Snow that I am transcribing for those 

 who may not understand the sign language of nature, was written in Bird- 

 craft Sanctuary and the surrounding hill country during the bitter winter of 

 1917-18. 



The protection of our winter birds, from our human standpoint, must 

 view them from several angles — death by shooting and trapping, death from 

 the presence of their natural enemies, and death from starvation, due to 

 wastage of their natural food-supply. The first cause may be obliterated by 

 wise laws faithfully enforced; the others offer a more complex problem. If 

 we would have the birds of winter with us, we must be systematic in all our 

 dealings with them, as we would be with domestic fowls or cattle. We should 

 not overload the feeding-table one week — at a time when natural food is 

 plenty — and then go away and leave it bare for perhaps the most icebound, 

 stressful month of winter. We must not make brush tepees and branch shelters 

 and then allow them to become the lairs of stray cats, rats, and weasels, for 

 by so doing we offer a false hospitality and assume a responsibility only to 

 shirk it; better make no effort, and let the birds pass by. 



Now I hear someone bringing up the well-worn quibble: "If winter birds 

 are valuable because they eat the grubs hiding in the tree bark, is it not doing 

 away with their usefulness to feed them, as well as making paupers of them." 

 People who argue thus have never even turned the first page of The Birds' 

 Book of Snow or they would know that all the human help is auxiliary work, 

 at best a sort of first-aid to bird-life made necessary by a climate that is a 

 professional juggler with his trick-box, a thing never to be wholly understood. 



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