WHAT I HAVE DONE WITH BIRDS 



impoverish all other winter singers, and for what? Merely to 

 prove that some fiend with a gun could drop a shining mark. 



Always I have been the devout worshiper, the true lover of 

 this bird. By the time I reached the cabin, The Song of the Car- 

 dinal had been sung in my heart. I immediately set about gather- 

 ing notes and searching for nests from w r hich to make illustrations 

 for the protest I had planned. Never having seen a photograph 

 of a Cardinal, either male or female, and because of the disposi- 

 tion of the bird, I realized I would have to attempt a thing which 

 no one else had accomplished. As I scooped a grave deep in the 

 orchard, laid the bird in and covered him with leaves before I 

 packed in the earth, I vowed to make the name of any man who 

 would kill a Cardinal repulsive to humanity. 



The first thing was to find nests. Bob, the man on our farm 

 and several oil-men were enlisted in the cause. During the next 

 three years studies were made of over a dozen Cardinal loca- 

 tions. I wanted a perfect, typical nest with a full clutch of eggs, 

 a series of the young ; and grown birds in every conceivable atti- 

 tude which would display their beauty, their devotion to their 

 mates, their fiery dispositions and their chosen environment. 



I am qualified to speak of the Cardinal as of no other bird, 

 having had three times the experience with him I have had with 

 any other. I did not despair of securing the studies needed to il- 

 lustrate the book I was planning, because when I was a child a 

 pair of Cardinals had built a nest near the ground, on a flat cedar 

 limb, not six feet from my father's front door. The remembrance 

 that it had taken me only a few days so to become acquainted with 

 them that I sat by the hour on the stoop, watching with a child's 

 broad sympathy every detail of their relations and home life, was 

 my comfort now. If I could win a pair of Cardinals to trust me 



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