world had claimed at last accounts. The "Blue Jays" {Aphelocoma californica) 

 of San Luis Obispo County destroyed last year some ten million birds' eggs. 

 Fourteen years of governmental operations in Mexico exact a toll about equal 

 at the outside to the natural breakage of a single California township for one 

 season. But of course the R. S. P. B. will feel sure that the world's supply of 

 bird life is about to be throttled in embryo. 



Of Robert W. Williams, the present solicitor of the U. S. Department of 

 Agriculture, we read in a charmingly written article by JohnK. Sanford, that 

 he is charged with the enforcement of laws which vitally affect the welfare of 

 every person in the United States. It was Williams who fought the Reed gang 

 of Missouri, and who won from the Supreme Court of the United States the final 

 vindication of the Migratory Bird Act, a decision in which the Court declared the 

 cause of bird protection to be "a natural interest of very nearly the first magni- 

 tude.'' Of course! because Mr. Williams, who is "a red-blooded, whole-hearted, 

 healthy man" is himself passionately fond of the birds, and because he spends 

 his leisure hours at Tallahassee in the company of his bird friends. His develop- 

 ment as an amateur and scientific ornithologist was a perfectly normal one, 

 because "as a schoolboy the collection of birds' eggs and study of birds was more 

 than a fad with him, and he continued his study as a pastime after his gradua- 

 tion 1898." And this governmental characterization is a fair epitome of the early 

 history of nearly every ornithologist of any prominence in America. The bat- 

 talions of the ultras are not recruited from the ranks of the soberly trained natural- 

 ists, but rather from the fringes of the me-toos, who repeat the catch words of 

 their leaders without the slightest suspicion that they are uttering nonsense. 

 Oology has little to fear from men of the Nelson and Williams type. 



[Since we penned the foregoing, Mr. Williams has become a Member of 

 the M. C. O.] 



NEST OF SWAINSON'S HAWK (Buteo swainsoni) IN GIANT CACTUS (CeAsus gientgaus) 



40 



