86 OUR NATIVE ‘BIRDS 
lian game and all game birds have been exterminated. 
The only hunting sport these people know is the catch- 
ing and shooting of song birds during the spring and 
fall migration. If the Italian peasantry catch and eat 
nightingales and skylarks by the thousand, they may 
at least claim as a mitigating circumstance that there 
are no other creatures on which they can indulge their 
taste for out-door sport. Any one who has ever felt 
the exhilaration of a day’s shooting on a North Ameri- 
can rush-fringed lake, can sympathize with them, but 
in this country we cannot tolerate song-bird hunting 
as long as we have still millions of ducks and grouse. 
If a person will not go to the expense of reaching duck 
and grouse grounds, let him hunt song birds with ko- 
dak and camera— or track mice and rats. Fortunately 
only a few large cities have a bird-hunting population. 
A heavy penalty should be placed on the shooting of 
small birds that are not game birds. Park superin- 
tendents, landowners, and societies should put up signs 
calling attention to the law and the penalties. Such 
signs will not keep off all offenders, but they do keep 
away a great many and make all very cautious. Every 
offender caught should be handed over to the full 
severity of the law. On the military reservation of Ft. 
Snelling, Minn., such signs have proved very useful, so 
that its groves and river bottoms have become a para- 
dise for birds, although the reservation is easily acces- 
sible to residents of both St. Paul and Minneapolis. 
The points just discussed must make it evident to 
all bird lovers that it is to the interest of song birds to 
