﻿State Reports 271 



Club of America, is a member and lectures frequently at the meetings. He 

 and other members spend much time in the woods and fields studying birds 

 and arresting or admonishing their destroyers. Over two hundred bird -traps 

 .have been found and destroyed by the Society during the present year. 

 Much correspondence with bird enthusiasts in outlying towns and districts 

 is handled, and great effort is being made to secure the interest of our con- 

 gressmen amd members of the legislature to assist in the enacting of laws 

 for the better preservation of song and insectivorous birds in America." — 

 G. B. MASON, Secretary. 



The Burroughs Club of America: Pennsylvania. — "A growing 

 interest is apparent in bird study and bird protection in Pennsylvania, and 

 this is especially so in western Pennsylvania. Many schools are incorporating 

 the study of wild birds and animals in their courses of study: books on these 

 subjects are included in their supplementary reading and libraries. Young 

 people's societies are asking for addresses and lectures on birds, and women's 

 clubs are interesting themselves similarly, the State Federation of Women's 

 Clubs of Pennsylvania having requested a paper from our secretary, Miss 

 Mary H. Gibson, for their annual session. Farmers are taking an interest 

 in native birds and their protection, largely through the efficient and unsel- 

 fish labors of our State Economic Zoologist, Prof. H. A. Surface, whose 

 bulletins on the subject are eagerly sought and whose lectures abound in 

 sympathy. 



"Farmers in many communities are banding together and establishing 

 bird preserves in which no shooting or hunting is permitted. The superin- 

 tendents and managers of coal-mining concerns are, in numerous instances, 

 taking it upon themselves to see that the laws are not violated by the 

 foreigners in their employ. Thus some of the worst conditions we have had 

 to meet were immediately dissipated. 



" Schools and manual training classes are, in places, taking up systematic 

 bird-home construction and erection. Bird feeding in winter during the 

 year was widely practiced. The work, as we see ;t, has just begun, how- 

 ever, for it is to be doubted if any state had worse conditions in the matter 

 of flagrant, persistent and unpunished violations of the law. In many com- 

 munities scarcely a bird was allowed to live, boys and foreigners working a 

 most cruel and wanton destruction. Since active labor toward strict law 

 enforcement was undertaken, some of these regions report a marked increase 

 in bird life. Conditions are still bad in many places, sufficient volunteers for 

 law enforcement not yet having appeared. Almost every conceivable viola- 

 tion of law is still practiced in remote districts." — C. Leon BRUMBAUGH, 

 President. 



