LAND BIRDS 309 



and should be killed. The cowbird should be added to this list, 

 since it lays its eggs in the nests of smaller birds. When this 

 hatches, it deprives their young of room and care, often pushing 

 them out of the nest, or taking their food and allowing them to 

 starve. The blackbirds and jaybirds are questionable charac- 

 ters, since they are so mean about robbing nests and driving 

 away other birds. The protection of all but the few birds named 

 should be emphasized, especially by all farmers and fruit growers. 



The useless destruction of bird life every year is alarming. 

 Besides the thousands on thousands killed for food, there are 

 thousands of others killed l^y the plume-hunters to gratify the 

 foolish pride of thoughtless, silly women. Much as this is to be 

 deprecated, it slaughters but one-fifth as many birds as those 

 killed by men and boys for the mere sport of killing. Surely 

 the killing for the love of it, many times leaving the birds to 

 decay where they have been shot, perhaps only wounded and 

 left to die by a slow torture of starvation, is a cruel and sense- 

 less practice, yet fully one-half of all the birds killed in the United 

 States are killed merely for sport.^ 



Surely it is time to stop and think; time to teach the coming 

 generation the value of birds to human life; time to teach the 

 boys and girls to love the birds and to study their habits, so as to 

 learn which are friends and which foes. Girls should learn that 

 a dead bird upon the hat, no matter how beautiful, is a mark of 

 the heartlessness of the wearer. Boys should be taught to shoot 

 birds with a camera, not with a gun. It takes far more intelli- 

 gence and skill and will be found a more fascinating sport. 



Laws are being made in many states for bird protection. The 

 United States Government is making bird reservations, such as 

 Pelican Island, off the coast of Florida; Breton Island, Louisiana; 

 Stump Lake, North Dakota, and Yellowstone Lake in the 

 National Park. 



Geographic Distribution. — Birds as a class are the most 

 widely distributed of all animals. They are at home in the 

 frozen regions of the North or in the dense shades of the tropics, 

 upon the rocky steeps of the mountains, or out on the ocean far 

 from sight of land. Their wide range of variation in structure 

 and habits renders them, as a class, able to adapt themselves to 

 1 Hornaday, p. 172. 



