DANGER OF AN EARLY EXTINCTION oF sonG BIRDS. 179 
disfigure and ruin so many apple and wild cherry 
trees. 
Our native sparrows live almost wholly on insects 
and the seeds of troublesome weeds. 
Space will not allow the continuance of this enumer- 
ation, but this kind of services expresses only in small 
part the valuable uses for which we should hold the 
birds in great favor. They minister in a large degree 
to our intellectual enjoyments; to our love of nature 
in its most attractive forms; to our taste for beauty 
and music—not in equal measure, it is true, to the igno- 
rant, the uncultured, the unimaginative—but to people 
of refinement, endowed with sensibility and imagina- 
tion, the birds are large elements in the sum of inno- 
cent pleasure. 
Men are generally slow to realize the danger of los- 
ing that which is apparently abundant, especially if it 
costs nothing. One sees this in the wanton destruction 
of useful forests and in the lavish waste of quantities 
of valuable timber, but in nothing else is this shown so 
clearly as in the senseless and wicked waste of bird life. 
It seems difficult to make people understand the pres- 
ent causes which, unless speedily checked, will surely 
lead to the extermination of several species of our 
native birds, and among them several that are the most 
useful and interesting. 
Let us examine a few of these causes, some of which 
have long existed, and others that are of recent origin. 
Among the latter are the English sparrows, which are 
driving our native birds out of villages and cities more 
