^°j904^n DuTCHER, Report of Committee on Bird Protection. I^C 



session, but not unless I can be down there to explain away any 

 opposition. However, I must say that the passage of a law for 

 protection is not of so much importance in the islands as would 

 appear, simply because its provisions cannot be enforced. Game 

 wardens are quite out of the question. There is no money to pay 

 them, and practically veiy little game to preserve or to regulate 

 the shooting of. The small insectivorous birds, which it is of the 

 greatest importance to protect and preserve, all live in the remote 

 and dense, uninhabited forests, where surveillance is impossible. 

 Nevertheless the fact that there is a law with penalties for infrac- 

 tion is of itself a certain though insufficient protection, and can be 

 invoked in such extreme cases as the collection of birds for 

 millinery purposes. 



"The most hopeless feature of the whole business is the 

 undoubted fact that Hawaiian birds are fast dying out from some 

 one obscure cause or from a combination of causes. There is 

 now, so far as I can ascertain, no indiscriminate killing of the 

 native birds, and very few are sacrificed by the leis hunters. 

 Under similar conditions our birds would increase fast enough, 

 but both large and small are disappearing and no one has sug- 

 gested an adequate cause. About five years ago Perkins col- 

 lected in a certain locality in Kona, where he found three rare 

 species to be quite common while the commoner species were in 

 swarms. He says the locality was simply a bird Paradise. Last 

 year I visited the place, in which probably a gun has not been 

 fired since Perkins was there. Ten days of the most careful 

 search failed to discover a single individual of either of the three 

 species, and the common birds were anything but abundant. It 

 was a cattle range in Perkins's day and is now, and the only change 

 I was able to note was an abundance of the Mynah which in 

 Perkins's time was probably not there at all. Yet the Mynah, so 

 far as I can see, does not meddle with the native birds. 



"I have gone into this subject at some length in my recently 

 published 'Birds of the Hawaiian Islands,' though about all I say 

 is that I do not know anything about the matter. 



"So it is a bit discouraging to try and frame laws for the pro- 

 tection of birds from men when, as a matter of fact, they require 

 to be protected from an unknown enemy rather than from man." 



