16 BIRDS. 
nest in the country round about that the wretches can 
lay hands on is harried. Their professional term for 
a nest of eggs is “a clutch,” a word that well ex- 
presses the work of their grasping, murderous fingers. 
They clutch and destroy in the germ the life and 
music of the woodlands. Certain of our natural 
history journals are mainly organs of communication 
between these human weasels. They record their 
exploits at nest-robbing and bird-slaying in their col- 
umns. One collector tells with gusto how he “ worked 
his way” through an orchard, ransacking every tree, 
and leaving, as he believed, not one nest behind him. 
He had +etter not be caught working his way through 
my orchard. Another gloats over the number of 
Connecticut warblers—a rare bird —he killed in 
one season in Massachusetts. Another tells how a 
mocking-bird appeared in southern New England and 
was hunted down by himself and friend, its eggs 
“clutched,” and the bird killed. Who knows how 
much the bird lovers of New England lost by that 
foul deed? The progeny of the birds would probably 
have returned to Connecticut to breed, and their 
progeny, or a part of them, the same, till in time the 
famous songster would have become a regular visitant 
to New England. In the same journal still another 
collector describes minutely how he outwitted three 
humming-birds and captured their nests and eggs,— 
a clutch he was very proud of. A Massachusetts bird 
harrier boasts of his clutch of the eggs of that dainty 
little warbler, the blue yellow-back. One season 
he took two sets, the next five sets, the next four sets, 
besides some single eggs, and the next season four sets, 
and says he might have found more had he had more 
time. One season he took, in about twenty days, three 
