4 BIRD STUDIES WITH A CAMERA 
brightened by the fact that this is not a picture of 
what has been but of what is! 
The camera thus opens the door to a field of sport 
previously closed to those who love birds too much 
to find pleasure in killing them; to whom Bob- 
White’s ringing whistle does not give rise to mur- 
derous speculations as to the number in his family, 
but to an echo of the season’s joy which his note 
voices, They therefore have a new incentive to take 
them out of doors; for however much we love Na- 
ture for Nature’s sake, there are few of us whose 
pleasure in an outing is not intensified by securing 
some definite, lasting result. 
We are not all poets and seers, finding sufficient 
reward for a hard day’s tramp in a sunset glow or 
the song of a bird. Enjoy these things as we may, 
who would not like to perpetuate the one or the 
other in some tangible form ? 
And here we have one of the reasons for the col- 
lecting of birds and eggs long after the collector’s 
needs are satisfied. He goes on duplicating and 
reduplicating merely to appease the almost univer- 
sal desire to possess any admired although useless 
object. Once let him appreciate, however, the pleas- 
ure of hunting with a camera, the greater skill re- 
quired, and the infinitely greater value of the results 
to be obtained, and he will have no further use for 
gun, climbing irons, and egg drill. 
Furthermore, the camera hunter possesses the ad- 
vantage over the so-called true sportsman, in that all 
is game that falls to his gun; there is not a bird too 
small or too tame to be unworthy of his attention ; 
nor are there seasonal restrictions to be observed, 
