86 OUR NATIVE BIRDS 



lian game and all game birds have been exterminated. 

 The only hunting sport these people know is the catch- 

 ing and shooting of song birds during the spring and 

 fall migration. If the Italian peasantry catch and eat 

 nightingales and skylarks by the thousand, they may 

 at least claim as a mitigating circumstance that there 

 are no other creatures on which they can indulge their 

 taste for out-door sport. Any one who has ever felt 

 the exhilaration of a day's shooting on a North Ameri- 

 can rush-fringed lake, can sympathize with them, but 

 in this country we cannot tolerate song-bird hunting 

 as long as we have still millions of ducks and grouse. 

 If a person will not go to the expense of reaching duck 

 and grouse grounds, let him hunt song birds with ko- 

 dak and camera or track mice and rats. Fortunately 

 only a few large cities have a bird-hunting population. 

 A heavy penalty should be placed on the shooting of 

 small birds that are not game birds. Park superin- 

 tendents, landowners, and societies should put up signs 

 calling attention to the law and the penalties. Such 

 signs will not keep off all offenders, but they do keep 

 away a great many and make all very cautious. Every 

 offender caught should be handed over to the full 

 severity of the law. Oa the military reservation of Ft. 

 Snelling, Minn., such signs have proved very useful, so 

 that its groves and river bottoms have become a para- 

 dise for birds, although the reservation is easily acces- 

 sible to residents of both St. Paul and Minneapolis. 



The points just discussed must make it evident to 

 all bird lovers that it is to the interest of song birds to 



