Birds and the Fruit-Farm 297 



investment, he will be on the spot to receive it, 

 promptly, with his bag. 



If after killing our common birds the farmer 

 would take the trouble to examine the contents of 

 their crops he would discover that forty-five per- 

 cent, is insects, thirty per cent, vegetable matter, 

 and twenty-five per cent, seeds, chiefly of weeds. 

 The contents vary with the season, being greater in 

 insects in spring and summer; in autumn, greater 

 in seeds of weeds. But man is a killing animal. 

 All our folk-lore abounds with stories handed down 

 from our remote ancestors of killings of man, beast, 

 and bird. What boy, seeing a bird, does not yearn 

 to kill it on the spot? A boy, a stone, and a bird; 

 a man, a gun, and no bird! Cruelty to animals? 

 But we cannot eat our cake and keep it. The 

 clock strikes warning; the time has come; we must 

 choose between fruit, food, and famine; between 

 birds and worms. 



Now birds, like men, must have food. What 

 food? Nature, in the wild, supplies her own with 

 nuts, buds, leaves, roots, seeds, flowers, and the 

 infinite variety of animal species. Species feeds 

 on species; this is the law of life on the globe. We 

 have cleared the land and destroyed the sources of 

 food for the birds. Much of the so-called injury to 

 fruit and other crops wrought by birds is wholly 

 due to the necessity we have imposed upon them. 

 Forests, shrubs, bushes, weeds, wild fruits, and 

 berries and all that world of life on which birds 

 feed in a state of nature we have quite destroyed, or 



