1/2 Cincinnati Socitty of Natural History. 



farmer. Most of our song-birds are insectivorous birds, and so are 

 the woodpeckers. We tlierefore ]jrotest against the destruction of 

 our birds, and think that they should be protected l)y jJubHc senti- 

 ment for the reason that they do more good than harm. 



'J'he increase of insects is marvelous. One insect may in one 

 year become the progenitor of six billion descendants. Three 

 hundred and twenty-five actual species of insects are known, and 

 it is thought that there as many more species unknown. If undis- 

 turbed, insects would destroy every green thing upon the earth's 

 surface, and men would j)erish ; but nature has provided enemies, 

 and prominent among them are the birds, -which keep the insects 

 in check without cost to the horticulturist. 



" A swallow, as it skims through the air on a summer day, 

 will destroy more insects than a farmer in the same length of t'me 

 sweating over a heavy bucket of Paris green mixture. 



"As the country became cleared of timber and more thickly 

 inhabited, the birds have been destroyed in large numbers, and in- 

 sects have gained the ascendancy." 



The question of the destruction of birds for food rests upon a 

 solid basis. 



Certain kinds of birds, viz., many of the ducks and waders, 

 are universally recognized as fit for food. To the shooting of 

 these, under projjer restrictions as to time and place, there appears 

 to be no reasonable objection. As to one class of birds there exists 

 a difference of opinion whether they should be eaten or not. At 

 Hampton, Va., two and one-half miles from Fortress Monroe, I 

 saw robins hung up for sale in the market. Alongside the ceme- 

 tery at Richmond, in the same State, I saw a gunner stealthily 

 hunting for robins. At the markets in the Nation's Capital, I 

 have seen exposed for sale bobolinks — there called reed birds — 

 stripped of their feathers and fastened together in bunches like 

 radishes. I could not eat the birds. In New England the killing 

 of these birds is prohibited, while in the South many sportsmen shoot 

 them for sport, and thousands of them are eaten. The amount of 

 food in one of these birds is so small that it seems an unequal 

 equivalent for the destruction of such a sweet songster as is the 

 bobolink, which James Russell Lowell so delightfully describes. 

 And yet even the destruction of game birds for food has been so 

 great that the hunter views with anxious eye their rapid disappear- 

 ance. The prairie chicken ([)innated grouse), once so plentiful in 



