THE AUDUBON SOCIETY OF 

 CALIFORNIA 



W. SCOTT -WAY 

 State Secretary 



WITH the beginning of tiie Audubon movement In this State, in 

 1904, the blue crane was the only non-game bird that had abso- 

 lute legal protection in California. Sea-gulls had been given 

 State protection within a certain distance of Santa Monica, and 

 there was a law protecting the meadowlark — a law with a string to It. 

 Any landowner or renter might shoot the meadowlark on his land if found 

 eating "fruit or crops." This proviso was inserted in the meadowlark pro- 

 tective act in the face of the fact that a meadowlark never eats fruit under 

 any condition, and is not only not injurious to the farmer's crops, but, on 

 the other hand, is one of the most beneficial birds to the grower of crops 

 In the whole catalogue. The reports of every ornithologist of note in the 

 United States will clinch this statement. 



Every spring in the cities of the southern part of California, Indians 

 stood upon the street-corners selling our peerless mockingbirds at a dollar 

 each, and often to persons who had no more idea of the food-habits and 

 needs of this bird than the bird had of theirs. Dealers employed boys to 

 collect nestlings, paying usually about twenty-five cents each, and hun- 

 dreds of nests of songbirds were thus despoiled. One dealer in Pasadena is 

 known to have obtained more than fifty mockingbirds in this way in a 

 single season, and there were many others doing fully as well toward 

 exterminating our splendid songsters. 



Turning to the game-bird list, we find in 1904, a horde of market- 

 hunters and "sports" ruthlessly killing the mourning-doves, and through 

 the greater part of their nesting season, a crime that was no less black be- 

 cause it was legal. There was then an open season of seven and a half 

 months for these birds, and "dove stew" was a common restaurant sign. 

 The birds were killed by the sackful over reservoirs or water-holes, or 

 "potted" from trees as they sat by their nest of helpless young. Fifty birds 

 a day to the man was the legal "limit," but the enterprising hunter could 

 easily stretch this in a lawful way by taking along a couple of boys to 

 "stand for" the extra hundred. These were "conditions" that confronted 

 the Audubon Society at the time of its organization at Pasadena less than 

 four years ago. 



At this writing California has a fairly good law protecting all of the 

 non-game birds except a few species which are classed as harmful. The 

 trade in songbirds native to the State has been broken up, and but few 

 species native to the United States can now be found in bird stores. 

 Commercial egg-collecting is still secretly carried on, but the Audubon 

 Society has already secured evidence sufficient to soon bring this illegal 

 traffic to a sudden halt. The open season for hunting doves has been cut 

 to three months, the bag limit reduced to twenty-five and a non-sale clause 

 enacted. The crime of killing these birds in their nesting season is still 

 a legal crime, and the Society is pledged to oppose it just as long as the 

 act permitting it disgraces the Code of California. 



During the past year the Audubon Society of California has printed 

 and distributed throughout the State more than twenty thousand pam- 

 phlets, warning cards, digests of the bird law, and educational leaflets. A 

 great deal of splendid work is being done in the public schools. The city 

 of Fresno alone has nearly one thousand junior members of the Audubon 

 Society in her schools, and these organizations of boys and girls, who 

 pledge themselves as bird protectors, are being reported from almost every 

 part of the State. It seems not unlikely that we shall have fifty thousand 

 of these young bird defenders in the public schools before the end of our 

 second year. 



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