Xo. 4.] REPORT OF STATE ORNITHOLOGIST. 95 



energetic remedies.^ But in time this lesson was forgotten, 

 and in 1914, according to Edwin Fox Sainsbun-,- in many 

 departments in France where great quantities of insect-eating 

 birds are still destroyed annually, a bitter en' was heard from 

 the farmers regarding crops destroyed and lessened yields. La 

 Societe d'Horticulture Pratique du Rhone issued warnings and 

 recommendations to the public. The society gave statistics of 

 the enormous number of birds destroyed by the people, and 

 urged, first, that the existing laws for protecting small birds 

 must be immediately enforced with the utmost stringency, and 

 second, that in the schools children should be taught the utility 

 of protecting birds, the wickedness of ""bird-nestrng" and the 

 necessity of encouraging the increase of birds. 



Wlien the great European war is over we are likely to be 

 flooded with immigrants from European countries, where people 

 kill small birds for food. The least we can do is to teach their 

 children in the schools to protect birds. Already a committee 

 of Massachusetts school superintendents has drawn up a plan 

 of a course in physiology, hygiene, nature study, and plays 

 and games for the rural schools. School Superintendent A. J. 

 Chidester of Warren, of the committee, who has had charge of 

 that part of the plan relating to nature study, including bird 

 study, has been in consultation with this office. The course 

 has been printed, submitted to a conference of school super- 

 intendents for criticism, and is now (December, 1915) in the 

 hands of a committee of normal school teachers for ''sugges- 

 tions and application of suitable method." This course con- 

 tains a plan for a little bird study in the grades of the common 

 schools, from the first to the sixth. It is important to interest 

 the children of the lower grades in birds and their protection. 

 This should not be left to the curriculum of the high schools, 

 as a great majority of children never reach the high school. 

 Young children are particularly receptive to influences such as 

 they may receive from rational instruction regarding bird life. 



» Report U. S. Com'r of Patents, 1S61, pp. 322, 323. 

 » "Oxir Dumb Animals," June, 1914, p. 10. 



