xxivni INTRODUCTION. 
“The causes for this state of things are not remote or hidden. Some arise from 
circumstances over which there can not be in the order of nature anything like modifi- 
cation or control, while others in well ordered societies should be easily preventable. 
Rapid settlement has wrought the most marked changes in the environment of our birds. 
Many of those which used to nest upon our prairies have been driven away. The 
breaking-plow has as utterly ruined their haunts and homes as the presence of the white 
man has wiped out the wild Indians. True, some of the more domestic kinds may linger 
about the meadows we have made, but the conditions are so changed that the mass of 
those which build their nests upon the ground have sought newer sections of country far 
away, from which they will soon be driven again by the ever advancing tide of settlement. 
“Several species, notably the Red-winged Blackbirds, nest in and about our prairie 
sloughs. Cultivation has been for years gradually reclaiming these sloughs and trans- 
forming them into dry land, while within a very short time, tile drainage has been 
making these changes with marvelous rapidity. The Red-wings, the Yellow-headed 
Blackbirds, and Marsh Wrens, build their nests in the tops of the reeds and coarse 
grasses, out in the water, to protect themselves and their young from foxes and other 
vermin. There can be no doubt that they return to the same nesting places year after 
year. But when the tile drain makes dry land of the old slough, which has been a 
miniature lake ever since the ice-plow scooped out its bed, the occupation of these poor 
birds is gone, and they must betake themselves to regions more remote. One of the 
quite visible results of our one hundred and more Iowa tile factories will be the very 
rapid thinning out of these beautiful birds. 
“The loss which this will entail upon the farmer, the gardener, and the orchardist, 
we need not stop to calculate. It may be faintly imagined when it is stated that Wil- 
son, the father of American ornithology, in his time estimated that they annually 
destroyed 16,000,000,000 insects in the then area of the United States. They are among 
the earliest birds to return from the sunny South, for many of them are singing in the 
tree tops in February, while the ground is still covered with snow. They are the last 
to leave us in autumn or winter. They do little damage, so little, indeed, in comparison 
with their useful work that a decent Christian should be ashamed to mention it; though 
it was once attempted with marvelous stupidity and monumental wickedness to pass a 
law in Iowa offering rewards for their destruction.... That the beautiful Red-wings 
do a world of good, that they are most emphatically ‘feathered friends,’ the observa- 
tions of the revered Wilson fully established almost a century ago. 
“Again, our forests are rapidly disappearing, and it would not seem that the 
average artificial grove is accepted as a good substitute for that furnished by nature— 
though it is a most welcome home for many species. Especially is this true of evergreen 
groves. This becomes most palpable to any one who has listened to the songs of the 
birds, and ‘the music of the wind in the pines’ which surround the beautiful, princely 
home of ‘No. 20’ Whitney, at Franklin Grove, Illinois. While the artificial grove—and 
more especially evergreens— will arrest the emigration of some species, and shelter them 
from their enemies, there can be no doubt that we are not planting enough of the right 
kinds of timber to hold our own with the birds. A heavy balance is still against us, 
and it is constantly increasing. 
