BIRD ENEMIES. 235 



Thus are our birds hunted and cut off, and all in 

 the name of science ; as if science had not long ago 

 finished with these birds. She has weighed and meas- 

 ured and dissected and described them and their nests 

 and eggs, and placed them in her cabinet ; and the 

 interest of science and of humanity now demands that 

 this wholesale nest-robbing cease. These incidents I 

 have given above, it is true, are but drops in the 

 bucket, but the bucket would be more than full if we 

 could get all the facts. Where one man publishes his 

 notes, hundreds, perhaps thousands, say nothing, but 

 go as silently about their nest-robbing as weasels. 



It is true that the student of ornithology often feels 

 compelled to take bird-life. It is not an easy matter 

 to " name all the birds without a gun," though an 

 opera -glass will often render identification entirely 

 certain, and leave the songster unharmed ; but once 

 having mastered the birds, the true ornithologist 

 leaves his gun at home. This view of the case may 

 not be agreeable to that desiccated mortal called the 

 "closet naturalist," but for my own part the closet 

 naturalist is a person with whom I have very little 

 sympathy. He is about the most wearisome and 

 profitless creature in existence. With his piles of 

 skins, his cases .of eggs, his laborious feather-split- 

 ting, and his outlandish nomenclature, he is not only 

 the enemy of the birds but the enemy of all those 

 who would know them rightly. 



Not the collectors alone are to blame for the di- 

 minishing numbers of our wild birds, but a large 



