ts4 MICHIGAN BIRD LIFE. 
sponsible parties, but certain persons should be designated and paid for the 
work, and proper precautions should be taken to prevent accident of any 
kind. The system which has been successfully used by individuals in 
various places in the country is as follows: During midwinter, when the 
Sparrows have congregated in the towns and cities and when heavy snow 
has covered most of the available food and they are pinched more or less 
for supplies, they should be baited for several successive days to some 
stable yard or inclosed area where they will gather in immense numbers 
if not needlessly alarmed. When several hundreds have thus been lured 
to feed regularly, and the amount of food which they will consume com- 
pletely has been determined, a similar amount of the same food, previously 
soaked with strychnine and carefully dried, is fed to them at the usual time. 
Ordinarily the whole of this poisoned grain will be eaten, and four-fifths 
of the Sparrows will die within a few moments and within a few yards of 
the feeding place. The remainder will flutter a little farther away, but 
within a few hours every Sparrow which ate at this place is likely to die. 
No danger whatever is to be apprehended to cats, dogs, pigs or other animals 
which might eat the poisoned Sparrows, and if any poisoned grain is left 
uneaten it can readily be swept up for use at another time or can be de- 
stroyed by burning if desired. There is far less cruelty in killing Sparrows 
in this way than by ordinary shooting or trapping, since experiment with 
caged Sparrows shows that strychnine is very quickly effective and that the 
Sparrows die from it with practically no pain at all. It is important that 
the poisoning should be done only during the winter season, when all native 
birds are absent, and in case poultry or pigeons are attracted by the baiting 
they may be excluded by the use of coops made of laths, through the spaces 
of which the Sparrows can pass freely while the pigeons will be kept out. 
For illustrations of the working of the Michigan law and other bounty 
laws the reader should consult the work on the English Sparrow already 
mentioned, or an article by Dr. T. S. Palmer entitled ‘‘Extermination of 
Noxious Animals by Bounties,’ which may be found in the Yearbook 
of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1896, pp. 55-68. 
If any bounty law is to remain upon the Michigan statute books it is 
certainly advisable that it should be materially different from the present 
law. Under the statutes Sparrows may be killed at- any time of year, 
although bounties may be paid only in December, January and February, 
and the examination of Sparrows so killed is made by the county clerk of 
the “township, village or city within which such Sparrows have been 
killed.” While the bounty law provides a fine for the attempt of any 
person to collect a bounty on birds other than English Sparrows, it is obvious 
that the aforesaid county clerk must be able to discriminate between 
English Sparrows and other birds or there is danger not only that bounties 
will be illegally paid, but that many of our valuable birds will be destroyed. 
Under the best conditions bounty laws are expensive and unsatisfactory, 
and so far as the English Sparrow in Michigan is concerned they are at 
least extremely unwise and ineffective. 
TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION. 
Adult male: Top of head clear gray; a broad stripe of chestnut runs backward from the 
eye and spreads on the nape and sides of neck so as to form an imperfect collar or cape; 
back and seapulars streaked with black and chestnut; rump and upper tail-coverts plain 
brownish gray; under parts grayish-white or almost white on sides of neck and cheeks, 
the middle line of throat and a large patch on the chest deep black; most of the wing- 
coverts and outer margins of secondaries and tertiaries bright chestnut, the middle coverts 
