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A BI-MONTHLY MAGAZINE 



DEVOTED TO THE STUDY AND PROTECTION OF BIRDS 



Official Organ of The Audubon Societies 



Vol. XXIII September— October, 1921 No. 5 



Why Birds Interest Me 



By EUGENE SWOPE 



I HAVE often noticed that many intelligent people wonder how anyone 

 can have a sustained interest in birds. Friends have asked: ''How can 

 you find it worth your time and effort to tramp about the deserted fields, 

 camp in the lonely woods, and loiter along the byways just to see and hear 

 birds?" "What do you find in birds to charm you so continually?" "What 

 is the source of your unfailing interest in birds?" 



It was a long time before I myself fully understood that it is not alone the 

 sohg, the form, the coloring, and the classification of birds, instructive and 

 entertaining as these matters are, that holds my interest. But it is what, for 

 the want of a comprehensive word, I call the glad-free-life of the wild birds. 

 This never fails to hail an element of myself that lies beyond my workaday 

 thoughts. Wild birds in some way symbolize to me a life of more spirit and 

 less clay which I seem to have lost for the most part somewhere along the way, 

 or perhaps that nature promised in full measure in youth but later in some 

 indigent mood withheld. No other manifestation in nature or art so nearly 

 corresponds to this eluding side of my life as the independent, songful life of 

 wild birds. 



Bird-life, it seems to me, definitely expresses a released state of being which 

 I feel an inherent right daily to live but cannot attain. Glimpsing this in 

 birds, I find a perpetual interest in them. If such a state of mind is possible, 

 I have a serene, emotional response to birds at any and all times. 



The charm I find in birds is, I believe, similar to that quiet joy known to 

 many when they chance upon verses wherein the poet has presented with 

 beauty and fullness, thoughts and emotions they themselves vaguely feel but 

 have not the gift to express. Bird-life is to me a living lyric theming an aspiring 

 element of my being. 



I seek the birds for that uplift for which we read the inspired authors, for 

 that state of fuller thought and feeilng that others find through the agency of 

 music, for that more than everyday self that still others arrive at through reli- 

 gious services. In the end, as I understand it, we are each seeking the same 



