222 What Birds Have Done With Me 



later on became general, universal. Longfellow 

 is really the pioneer writer on the economic value 

 of bird life, their value in protecting growing 

 things was seemingly as well known to the poet- 

 naturalist as to any scientist who has followed 

 him, examining stomachs and counting noxious in- 

 sects found therein. In his vision he saw a mighty 

 army of victorious worms, slimy, hideous, crawl- 

 ing everywhere, with nothing left to check their 

 onward march, now that the birds had all been 

 killed. 



The birds were massacred by the very farmers 

 whom they protected, for the reason that they 

 were robbers of the harvest. It's the same class 

 of men today who are doing nothing to save what 

 is left of our bird neighbors, an allied army of 

 bird soldiers fighting the onrush of wave after 

 wave of insect life that will, if not checked, sweep 

 the earth. When the men who had massacred 

 the birds saw the ruinous nature of the thing they 

 had done, they sent to other provinces and 

 brought back those forms of life of which their 

 fields and forests had been bereft and restored 

 what was lost. A thing impossible when the 

 countries of the earth have all exterminated their 

 birds. The present bird massacre means bird 

 extermination, final, eternal. 



While it may be true that we only know of the 

 absolute extermination of a dozen to twenty 



