No. 4.] DECREASE OF BIRDS. 481 



of birds and game have been killed in these hunts. Nothing 

 tends more to exterminate the birds and game than these 

 contests, and, the contestants being out to kill all they can, 

 some are sure to kill birds other than game birds. All 

 large birds and many small ones suffer. This association 

 of hunters in rivalry to kill game is a blot on the history of 

 civilization. It goes beyond the rapacity of the savage. 

 The native Indians expressed disgust when they first saw 

 the white men engaging in this kind of slaughter. It 

 should be prohibited by law. 



Italians and Other Foreigners. So long as there are 

 shooters, all large birds, whether game birds or not, are 

 doomed to endless persecution, merely because they make 

 good targets. Herons, hawks, owls, eagles and crows are 

 shot at sight, whenever opportunity offers, and those that 

 escape do so only by superior cunning and agility. Some 

 of our hawks and owls are certainly among the most useful 

 "6~f all birds, but this group suffers particularly at the 

 Tiands of the sportsman or gunner, because some hawks and 

 "owls kill some of the game. Farmers and poultrymen shoot 

 them also. 



A comparatively new element of danger to the smaller 

 birds, and, for that matter, to all birds, is the fast-increasing 

 horde of foreigners, mainly Italians, who come here from 

 their native, lands to engage in contract labor. Most of 

 these men seem to be sportsmen, hunters or trappers in 

 their way, but they regard everything that wears fur or 

 feathers as game. These people go out in small parties-, 

 most of them armed with guns, and, in some cases at least, 

 shoot at nearly every living thing they see. I have been 

 told that if so much as a song sparrow gets up, the whole 

 party shoots at it. Some of these gentry came into my 

 yard in Medford in 1895, and shot a pair of bluebirds that 

 were nesting there. The birds are not shot for profit, for 

 their little bodies will not pay for half the ammunition fired 

 at them. They are shot for sport, and it is said they are 

 afterwards eaten. These people also trap and net birds. 

 Several of them have been arrested in the Middlesex Fells 

 Reservation with live birds in baskets, which they had 



