VALUABLE WILD LIFE 5 



of our feathered friends, right down to the present 

 hour, is a painful subject; but we must face our 

 own public record and answer to the charges 

 against us. 



Whenever man upsets the balance of nature, 

 that moment he begins, in one form or another, to 

 suffer for it and to pay. When the foolish farmers 

 of Pennsylvania demanded and received at Harris- 

 burg a law placing bounties on the heads of 

 slaughtered hawks and owls, by the end of two years 

 those farmers found their fields so overrun by wild 

 rats and mice that they clamored for the quick 

 repeal of the bounty law. Through their losses 

 they learned to appreciate the value of certain 

 hawks and owls as destroyers of noxious rodents. 



In 1908, we mentioned the fact that during the 

 previous ten years the woodpeckers of the New 

 York Zoological Park had decreased about 90 per 

 cent. In 1912, we noted with sorrow the appear- 

 ance of the terrible hickory-bark borer, and since 

 that time fully 50 per cent of our hickory trees have 

 been destroyed by that pest. Possibly these two 

 facts are unrelated; but to me their coincidence has 

 a sinister aspect. 



It is unfortunate that while so many observations 

 have been made on the anatomy and classification 

 of our wild creatures, more attention has not been 

 paid to their habits and interrelations. The manner 

 in which the lives and habits of our wild allies and 

 foes dovetail together is too little known, and needs 



