ought to be entrusted only to competent hands, and that with every assurance of 

 the greatest good to the greatest number of bird students. 



But for anatomists and skin-men to "bawl out" the oologists as culprits and 

 misdemeanants is a form of hypocricy which cannot be tolerated. A bird, as 

 every one knows, has only one life to give. When that life is taken, there is 

 nothing left to perpetuate the species, nor to fulfil any of a dozen expectations of 

 beauty, economic value, or instructive behavior, for which the world waits. But 

 when only a set of eggs is taken, there remain the same certainties of perpetuation, 

 reduplication, and increase. When the right to collect birds' eggs is exercised 

 with sensible moderation, and such moderation we advocate, the economic 

 status of bird life is virtually untouched. A female bird produces on the average, 

 say, twentv-five eggs in a lifetime. Some species, as Petrels and Hummingbirds, 

 would possibly fail of that number, while others, as Titmice or Quails or even 

 Sparrows, might average twice as much. Under the mere stimulation of perse- 

 cution, some individuals will produce twice or three times that number of eggs in a 

 single season. The taking of a bird's nest, therefore, is scarcely comparable in 

 kinetic importance to the plucking of a feather from a bird's tail, let alone to the 

 killing of the bird itself. 



We cheerfully concede to ornithologists, to explorers, to curators of 

 responsible public museums, to avian anatomists, or even to speciation specialists, 

 the right to secure bird specimens, when such are intended to serve, and actually 

 do serve, the public good. But when representatives of institutions which 

 cherish bird-skins by thousands and tens of thousands, and which go right on 

 collecting bird-skins by thousands annually, — when the representatives of such 

 institutions roll their eyes heavenward and thank their divinities that they are 

 not found in the evil company of those who "rob birds' nests," it is time to call the 

 bluff. I know men, men who bear honored names in ornithology, who admit that 

 they have put up ten thousand, twelve thousand, fifteen thousand, bird-skins 

 with their own hands. They preside over institutions which have thirty, forty, or 

 it may be a hundred thousand bird-skins in custodv. Reckoning half these 

 numbers as females, and those as having passed hall their egg-laying period at the 

 time they were killed, we have in each skin taken an equivalent of six and one 

 quarter eggs. That is, it would be equivalent if the egg were not immediately 

 replaceable. But waiving that outstanding and redeeming fact, we will say that an 

 oologist, to lay an equivalent personal tax upon the bird world, would have to 

 prepare 62,500, 75,000, or 93,750 birds' eggs, respectively. No oologist living 

 or dead ever touched such figures. An institutional destruction upon a com- 

 parable basis would have to proceed to a magnitude of 187,500, 250,000, or 

 625,000 eggs, respectively. There are no such collections in existence, and 

 there probably never will be a collection, not even that of the rapacious M. C. O. 

 ("the new threat to birds"), which will equal the last-named figure. Be it ever 

 remembered that the "Blue Jays" of California destroy from one hundred 

 million to four hundred million birds' eggs or young per annum, and that a 

 comparable destruction, of Nature's own contriving, proceeds the world around. 



What shall we say, then, of the intelligence or the integrity or the pro- 

 fessional loyalty of men who expose the essential conditions of their own pro- 

 fession to such damaging comparisons as those above. Mr. Pycraft is reputed 

 to be connected with the British Museum, and in such a position must, of course, 

 approve of its policies. Let him state for our benefit what is the equivalent de- 

 struction, measured in terms of birds' eggs, of the bird skins which the honorable 

 administration of the British Museum received into the institutional coffers 

 during the year 1920. Yet Mr. Pycraft deplores the rise of an international in- 

 stitution whose annual toll will never exceed that represented by two or three 

 thousand bird skins, a quantity which a British shire or an African hillside would 

 never miss. Let the Curator of an American Museum (surely not the American 

 Museum) who is so "glad to learn that Mr. Dawson has not succeeded in securing 

 the cooperation of English ornithologists'' (only about twenty of the best of 

 them — quite sufficient, by the way, for the actual needs of exchange correspond- 

 ence, although we expect to welcome a great many more as active sympathizers 



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