378 



Bird - Lore 



verted into dollars and cents, some ofwhich 

 may be annexed bj^ himself. The engineer, 

 and more especially the irrigation engineer, 

 hates to see land lying idle that could be 

 irrigated through employing him to do the 

 job; the conservation of wild life or the 

 picturesque beauties of nature mean noth- 

 ing to his unimaginative brain compared 

 to the allurements of the almighty dollar 

 when employed to turn a lake or waterfall 

 into a truck garden or shoe factory. Being 

 an engineer himself, the writer knows some- 

 thing about him. Waterfalls are my special 

 prey. I hardly ever look at one without 

 making a mental calculation of how many 

 horse-power or kilowatts it would turn 

 out. Then again the thought occurs, if 

 once developed and used to turn a lot of 

 wheels in an ugly powerhouse, its beauty 

 is forever destroyed, and what a prosy old 

 world this would be if every bit of wild life 

 and primitive wilderness ceased to exist ! 

 Why is it that the normal man (and 

 woman) likes to put on old clothes and get 

 out into the wilderness, away from all arti- 

 ficial things, where nature has not been 

 defiled by the destroying hand of man? 



"If it is proper to destroy all natural 

 wonders for the sake of a few more acres 

 of grain, why is it not right, as Mr. Finley 

 suggests, to plow up all the parks and 

 lawns and plant them in cabbage or corn, 

 which, to some people, are far more beau- 

 tiful than any monarch of the forest or 

 gem-like lake in a dusty desert? In fact, 

 some people like only the kind of scener}- 

 they can eat. 



"There are millions of acres of good land 

 lying between the Mississippi River and 

 the Pacific Ocean that can be irrigated and 

 cultivated without destroying some natural 

 wonder. 



"Again, this crv of robbing the school 



fund is mostly political buncombe. No 

 child is going to suffer for the want of edu- 

 cation merely because these particular 

 lands are not sold to a few farmers. 



"It is also stated that the creation of 

 this bird reserve will tend to discourage 

 development of roads and railway construc- 

 tion in Harney County. However, it is 

 probable that the bird reserve would en- 

 courage the building of roads, since the 

 autoist is a powerful factor in the matter, 

 and any novel attraction to the tourist 

 brings dollars into the state. 



"The writer is not a member of the 

 Audubon Societj', but is one of the 'we's' 

 so facetiously referred to by Mr. Bennett, 

 for he would rather see a natural wonder 

 developed to the fullest extent with a good 

 road, inviting the tourist to the Malheur 

 Bird Reserve, and the conservation of our 

 fast disappearing game birds, than to see 

 it laid out in geometrical rectangles of hay 

 or grain, which can be produced more 

 abundantly on land in other parts of the 

 state. 



"If the people wish to exterminate all 

 wild life, why not abolish game laws en- 

 tirely, and do the thing at one fell swoop? 

 Two or three years would be enough with 

 the assistance of the game hog. 



"But I can well understand the attitude 

 of the local members of engineering societies 

 in opposing this bill. To many engineers 

 the most beautiful thing on earth is a mass 

 of concrete and steel replacing one of God's 

 masterpieces of nature. He hies himself to 

 the wilderness (at so much per), sets up 

 his transit, cuts down trees a thousand 

 years old, blows up rocks and scares all 

 the game out of the country, and down on 

 Malheur Lake probably cusses the ducks 

 and geese for sitting up late at night and 

 keeping him awake." 



