346 HOMING WITH THE BIRDS 



great world is so far from nature as despondent, 

 helpless, caged birds. It is time for every man and 

 woman wanting knowledge on the subject to go to 

 the woods and from the unconscious birds learn 

 what they prove they know by what they do in the 

 daily business of living. 



Added to this, I wish to register my most serious 

 protest against the work of professional ornitholo- 

 gists in hastening the extermination of rare and 

 unusual birds in their greed to secure specimens 

 for museum collections. Museum collections at 

 best are frail affairs, subject to moth, fading rapidly 

 in light. Yet, let any bird be reported as rare; 

 immediately pursuit of it with a gun begins. 



Ivirtland's warbler always has been the "rara 

 avis " of our ornithology. He is an especial beauty, 

 having a back of slaty blue with black stripes, a 

 breast in the adult male of clear, rich yellow, sides 

 striped with black. His history is one of the 

 bloodiest pages of ornithology. The way of science 

 is to shoot every Kirtland on sight. Of course, 

 Audubon and Wilson shot all their specimens: 

 one male Kirtland near Cleveland, "shot"; five 

 near Cleveland, "secured"; one near Cincinnati, 

 "shot"; one near Oberlin, "shot"; twenty -five in 

 Canada and the United States altogether, "cap- 

 tured"; fifty in winter haunts in Bermuda, "tak- 

 en"; two on coasts of Virginia and South Carolina, 

 "shot." One writer states: "The pursuit of this 

 woodland beauty, whose only offense is rarity, has 



