BIRDS 



CHAPTER I 



WHAT BIRDS DO FOR US 



In the quite sudden popular interest in natiu*e recently 

 manifest, birds have come in for perhaps the lion's share 

 of attention. Unlike most movements, this is an ab- 

 solutely new one in the history of the world, not a revival. 

 One might have thought that so intensely practical a 

 people as the Americans would have taken up economic 

 ornithology first of all, have learned with scientific cer- 

 tainty which birds are too destructive for siurvival and 

 which so valuable that every measure ought to be taken 

 to preserve and increase them. In reaUty, this has been 

 the last aspect of the subject to receive attention. First 

 came the classifiers — Wilson, Audubon, Baird, and Nut- 

 tall — the pioneers in systematic bird study. Thoreau 

 was as a voice crying in the wilderness. His books lay in 

 piles on the attic floor, unsold many years after his death. 

 It remained for John Burroughs to awaken the popular en- 

 thusiasm for out-of-door life generally and for birds par- 

 ticularly, which is one of the signs of our times. 



Among the first acts passed in the Colonies were bounty 

 laws, not only offering rewards for the heads of certain birds 

 that were condemned without fair trial, but imposing fixed 



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