BIBB NOTES AND NEWS. 



31 



BIRD AND TREE DAY. 



For the fifth year in succession The Royal Society 

 for the Protection of Birds is offering County 

 Challenge Shields for competition in Elementary 

 Schools in order to establish and encourage the 

 observance of Bird and Tree (Arbor) Day in the 

 British Isles. During the first week of October 

 the Council expects to receive some hundreds of 

 essays written by schoolchildren in six counties on 

 the birds and trees they have watched and studied 

 throughout the summer months. With the small 

 funds available it is of course impossible for the 

 Society to make the scheme a national one. It can 

 only, as it were, plant the seed as the School Teams 

 plant saplings. Each school shows thereby that 

 something has been taught and learned of the 

 beauty and value of trees, and demonstrates its 

 sense of the importance of forest and wood, shade- 

 tree and fruit-tree. The Society, in like manner, 

 expresses by these County Competitions its opinion 

 that a national need exists for a more intelligent 

 knowledge of birds and trees, from the aesthetic, 

 the educative, and commercial points of view ; and 

 its opinion, also, that Bird and Arbor Competitions 

 and the celebration of Bird and Arbor Day form 

 the best means of popularizing that knowledge. 

 The scheme has been tried by other countries and 

 thus constitutes an international link ; it has been 

 found to open children's eyes, quicken theirfaculties, 

 enlarge their sympathies, and thus commends itself 

 to educational leaders ; and it gives occasion for 

 a national ho iday, which is in itself no small 

 recommendation in this utilitarian work-a-day 

 world. 



The Society can hardly do more than this until 

 public bodies take up the matter in a practical 

 manner, and, through the Society or otherwise, 

 institute the yearly competition and the yearly 

 festival as a part of the recognized school curri- 

 culum. The years chosen for the experiment have 

 not been fortunate ones, on account of the 

 extremely unsettled state into which both autho- 

 rities and teachers have been thrown by successive 

 Education Acts ; and, therefore, the number of 

 competing schools has in some counties not been 

 so large as could be wished. But the quality of 

 the work sent in is at least promising, and in some 

 cases has very pleasantly surprised the judges by 

 the remarkably high standard attained. 



The scheme may now be said to have had a fair 

 trial. It has met with the general approval, and 

 in several cases the active co-operation of County 

 Council Education Committees and Directors of 



Education, while the sympathetic support it has 

 had from teachers— who have in too many cases 

 had to work the whole thing single-handed from 

 inception to festival — is the most gratifying proof 

 that could be received of the practical value of the 

 plan. The pleasure displayed by the children in 

 the novel task set them is an equally happy proof 

 that it fits into the natural interests of boys and girls. 

 In addition to the Challenge Shields, book- prizes 

 are given to the members of winning teams, and 

 awards to every school obtaining Honourable 

 Mention. This year medals will be given to all 

 essayists whose work reaches the required standard, 

 with book-awards to the schools, and certificates 

 in the case of teams adjudged excellent. 



The first Arbor Day is said to have been held 

 some five hundred years ago in a little Swiss 

 village. The villagers wished to plant a bare patch 

 of common land with oak-trees ; and as the first 

 efforts at planting acorns were not successful a 

 day was appointed in which every available man, 

 woman, and child marched in a body to the sur- 

 rounding woods and carefully dug up and bore 

 away young saplings to plant on the green ; each 

 boy and girl was rewarded with a wheaten roll, 

 and the evening of the day was devoted to merry- 

 making. The little grove was nursed and tended 

 by the community, and the anniversary was cele- 

 brated each year by a procession of children carrying 

 oak-boughs and by a general festival. Other Swiss 

 and German villages adopted the idea. If forest- 

 trees were not needed, fruit-trees could be planted 

 by the roadsides for wayfarers and for birds. In 

 later times the United States, Australia, and 

 Canada, have brought the scheme vigorously to 

 the front, and the protection of birds has naturally 

 associated itself with the planting and preseivation 

 of trees. The first English village to institute 

 Arbor Day was Eynsford in Kent, where the 

 scheme has been energetically promoted by Mr. 

 E. D. Till, who in 1901 won the first prize offered 

 by the R.S.P.B. for an essay on the best means of 

 establishing Bird and Arbor Day in England ; and 

 the first English village to celebrate Bird and 

 Arbor Day combined was Awbridge, in Hampshire, 

 where Mrs. Suckling anticipated the Society's 

 scheme by organizing a festival in May, 1902. The 

 first Festival under the Society's Competitions was 

 held at Touchen End, in Berkshire, in the autumn 

 of 1902. 



The Winter Number of Bird NOTES AND 

 News will contain a report of the 1906 Compe- 

 tition. 



