BIRDS 35 



CHAPTER II. 



OUR BIRDS FRUIT INSECTS FARM HELP BOY'S CABIN PETS 



FORESTRY GAME PRESERVE HEDGES ROADS GUTTERS 



ICE PLAY SIDE OF FARMING COUNTY FAIR 



SYMPTOMS OF BUILDING MANIA. 



TT adds new zest to living to be up and about with the meadow 

 * lark, and is rare joy occasionally, when the days are longest, to 

 beat the birds at their game of early rising, and hear from copse and 

 tree-top dawn twitters, swelling into orisons of greeting to the King 

 of Day. An early to bed regime made possible an occasional summer 

 stroll at four a. m., that rare hour of nature's awakening so seldom 

 appreciated by the great mass of humanity because unseen. 



Bird Annihilation Spells Famine. 



Though but the merest fraction of the nine hundred or more 

 North American bird species nested and lived among us, numerically 

 they were legion.* The quantities of cherries, berries, seeds, grubs, 

 worms and insects attracted them to our orchards by thousands and 

 they were welcomed with open arms as man's best friends. A 

 leading scientist, an extremist, has said, "Obliterate the birds, and you 

 blot man from this planet within nine years." The "death cham- 

 ber" of the bird we seldom found though a rocky cleft or a hole in a 

 tree, sometimes serving as an ossuary, at rare intervals gave up the 

 secret. Isolation in the death hour seems the choice of all animal 

 life. 



The birdling in a single day develops as far toward maturity 

 as an infant in a year. This rapid growth requires an insect menu 

 of wide scope and great quantity. For example, it is on record 

 that a pair of house martins (swallows) fed their young over three 

 hundred times in sixteen hours. We managed to accom- 

 modate the growing birds, and still have so many left-overs that 

 additional slaughter of the innocents by fire, poison and force of 

 arms alone prevented serious damage to our crops. To walk through 

 field and pasture with opera glass, camera, pad and pencil and ever 

 so feebly try to fathom bird lore was keen delight. 



Bob White. 



From "Round Meadow," the only nomenclature of the past that 

 clung to the old farm, came the liquid notes of the brown thrasher 



* Authorities claim that the climate of Connecticut not only allows a wider range in 

 plant growth than any other state but that a greater variety of birds lives within its borders. 



