WILD WINGS 
148 
thing to overturn the balance of nature. Destroy our birds, 
and very soon we find calamity overtaking our harvests, 
orchards, lawns, or foliage, costing untold millions of money 
to the nation. 
If women would not buy these slaughtered remains, with 
the absurd idea that they are ornamental, men would not 
shoot the poor things for the millinery market, so that the 
responsibility for certain sad and irreparable losses must be 
laid to woman. Otherwise millions of beautiful birds would 
add charm and interest to what are rapidly becoming well- 
nigh silent landscapes. Multitudes of children, youth, and 
adults are studying birds afield, finding pure delight, intellec¬ 
tual uplift, cure of care, incentive to outdoor e.xercise, with 
consequent gain to health and jDrolongation of life. Attend¬ 
ants and nurses in sanitariums are pursuing courses in bird- 
study, in order to interest their patients in out-of-door things, 
to the saving of health and life, in these days of nervous 
strain. Every woman who wears feathers of harmless or use¬ 
ful wild birds is making herself a stumbling-block in the wav 
of all this good, and is, even though thoughtlessly, an abettor 
in the ultimate destruction of our bird-life, which is certain 
to come, if the present course is pursued. 
I venture to ask whether the millions of people who to-dav 
love wild nature have no rights which deserve respect, and 
whether the same sordid spirit which placards the beautiful 
country, particularly along the railways, with its hateful bill¬ 
boards about whiskies, worthless pills, and the like — I for 
one make it a principle to boycott all firms that so advertise 
— is to ride rough-shod over us at the decree of a barbarous 
fashion that commands us to revert to the scalps and trophies 
of savagery, even though it devastate and destroy the beauty 
of God’s wonderful world. Theodore Roosevelt has written : 
“ Spring would not be spring without bird-songs any more 
