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ducks bred. I found that the wood and 

 the pond had disappeared, and there grew 

 a vast field of corn. 



Give wild things the least bit of wilder- 

 ness, and they will survive in spite of 

 nature and man. The other day a wild- 

 cat attacked a child in one of the oldest 

 settled parts of Indiana. It came out of 

 an unreclaimed ravine on the banks of the 

 Ohio River. I saw a lone log-cock in a 

 considerable wood of the Kankakee region 

 a few years ago. But you cannot save 

 the birds and at the same time starve them, 

 and refuse them both nesting- places and 

 shelter from the cold. Woman's hats and 

 man's guns are hard on birds, but the 

 rustic's utensils are harder on them. En- 

 lightened farming, the making of produc- 

 tive and neatly shorn estates, the march of 

 the plow, the ditching-machine, the under- 

 ground tile, the patent reaper and mower 

 and thresher, the cats, the owls, the hawks, 

 winter without shelter, summer without 

 food, spring without nesting-places, these 

 are the agencies that are destroying birds 

 by the wholesale. And then, there is the 

 So 



