18 BIRDS. 



compelled to take bird-life. It is not an easy matter 

 to "name all the birds without a gun," though aa 

 opera-glass will often render identification entirely 

 certain, and leave the songster unharmed ; but onoe 

 having mastered the birds, the true ornithologist leaves 

 his gun at home. This view of the case may not be 

 agreeable to that desiccated mortal called the " closet 

 naturalist," but for my own part the closet naturalist 

 is a person with whom I have very little sympathy. 

 He is about the most wearisome and profitless creature 

 in existence. With his piles of skins, his cases of 

 eggs, his laborious feather-splitting, and his outlandish 

 nomenclature, he is not only the enemy of the birds 

 but the enemy of all those who would know them 

 rightly. 



Not the collectors alone are to blame for the dimin- 

 ishing numbers of our wild birds, but a large share 

 of the responsibility rests upon quite a different class 

 of persons, namely, the milliners. False taste in 

 dress is as destructive to our feathered friends as are 

 false aims in science. It is said that the traffic in 

 the skins of our brighter plumaged birds, arising 

 from their use by the milliners, reaches to hundreds 

 of thousands annually. I am told of one middleman 

 who collected from the shooters in one district, in four 

 months, seventy thousand skins. It is a barbarous 

 taste that craves this kind of ornamentation. Think 

 of a woman or girl of real refinement appearing upon 

 the street with her head gear adorned with the scalps 

 of our songsters ! 



>/ It is probably true that the number of our birds 

 destroyed by man is but a small percentage of the 

 number cut off by their natural enemies ; but it is to 

 be remembered that those he destroys are in addition 



