REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I914 29 



material concerns of humanity; no one can eat them, their eggs 

 are no longer of moment as a source of food supply; and, indeed, 

 some of the members of these remarkable colonies are under present 

 indictment of living too freely on the young fry of the salmon 

 streams ; thus, it is alleged, invading human happiness. 



The races of these birds are on that easy road that leads to 

 destruction. The appeal, then, if they are to be saved, must be to 

 the trained sentiment which deprecates and mourns the destruction 

 from off the earth of any of nature's creations ; which, as one 

 might say, gets the proper angle and apprehends their significance 

 in the great scheme of life. In every civilized community there is 

 a large, a very rapidly growing and perfectly comprehensible senti- 

 ment that would protest against a needless and an entirely avoid- 

 able destruction or waste of these products of creation. Such a 

 sentiment is a natural emotion ; it springs both from a sympathy 

 inborn with our aboriginal state and from^ an acquired apprecia- 

 tion of the ages of labor and experiment on the part of nature in 

 trying out her methods and her products until these ends have been 

 reached — ends, indeed, which, though seeming final, may actually 

 be mere passing stages on to something better. 



In a young country as large as ours where population and settle- 

 ment have been making a hard fight against the embarrassments 

 of the wilderness, it is natural that immigrants and invaders should 

 have shown a disregard of native life in so far as it fails to con- 

 tribute to human comfort; but the fact is an open one that the 

 more dense the population, the more highly cultivated the state of 

 the land, the greater becomes the abundance of wild life — a fact 

 evident throughout European countries where, in the midst of a 

 thick population, native races of birds, beasts and fishes are pre- 

 served in probably greater abundance and variety than even in 

 new lands like this. 



Our course here toward our native races of birds has been his- 

 torically incorrect until these later years. We have already per- 

 mitted the total extinction of some of our native birds and the 

 reduction of others to such scattered remnants that extinction at 

 an early date seems unavoidable unless the arm of the law can reach 

 farther than it is now doing. 



We have suffered serious permanent losses from our American 

 bird fauna. From the islands of the Gulf of St Lawrence, first 

 and foremost, the Great auk and the Labrador duck. Today the 

 Passenger pigeon, once, as wq all know, so tremendously abundant 

 in this country and such an obstruction to the ordinary operations 

 of the struggling farmers as (it is reported by Lahontan) to call 

 forth the excommunication of the bishops, is gone. The Wild tur- 

 key, sacred to the Puritan harvest feast, is exterminated from 

 Canada; the Whooping crane, the Trumpeter swan, the Golden 

 plover, the Hudsonian godwit, are all nearly extinct ; the Willet and 

 the Dowitcher are on the same declining path. 



Now, so far as our birds contribute to the' protection of our 

 commercial assets, in so far as they prevent by many millions of 



