302 An American Fruit-Farm 



Suddenly, the sharp whistling, whirring sound of 

 the sweeping hawk! But the hawk is a clever 

 device in the fowler's hands, a sort of rattle he uses 

 to frighten the victims. They plunge for shelter 

 into the copse. Threads! Tangled threads, full 

 of pockets, treacherously span the open spaces. It 

 is a fowler's net! The entangled birds flutter 

 frantically, hopelessly, and hang there, caught. 

 All the time the seared and blinded birds within 

 the ^'rick" keep up their piteous shrieking for help. 

 The low-browed, dark-handed man snatches the 

 linnet, the struggling captives lie with twisted 

 necks, a heap of dead song-birds in the comer. 

 And if you look closely, you will see the dark- 

 faced man thrust a sharply pointed stick through 

 the captives' eyes. He is proud of his ''catch." 

 He shows you two hundred birds in the comer. 

 If you will take the trouble, you can see half a 

 dozen ''Roccolos" from this one, and you can find 

 thousands of them all over Italy. One "rick" 

 reported ten thousand birds during a single autimm. 

 In the vicinity of Menaggio alone the slaughter of 

 birds in a single week amotmts to tens of thou- 

 sands. Sell them? Of course. Go to the mar- 

 ket-place, in Florence, Venice, Rome, Padua, Siena 

 — ^go to any market-place in any Italian town 

 and you see exposed for sale, regularly, redwings, 

 goldcrests, skylarks, yellow-hammers, hawfinches, 

 song-thrushes, warblers, linnets, bullfinches, yellow 

 birds, redbreasts, wrens, goldfinches, curlews, jays, 

 nut-hatches — ^song-birds, from fifty to a hundred 



