and punishment. No child who has done something to attract birds to 
his home needs to be told not to do things intended to drive them away. 
A brief list of things the boys and girls have actually done may 
be of interest. They have set out, about their school yards and their 
homes, a number of those trees, shrubs and plants given in the food 
chart as most valuable to attract birds and furnish food. This most 
important work of all is but just begun, but much interest has been 
aroused in it and the leaven is working. Numbers of children have 
made bird houses and done everything possible to attract birds to nest 
in them. In a few cases they have been successful, but they were 
carefully told at the start that there would not be birds enough to go 
around this year; that if everybody was careful to protect the nests 
and young, they might hope to have some another year. They have 
put out all sorts of nesting material, even to the clippings of their own 
hair, and have quite generally been delighted by seeing the birds carry 
it away. Dishes of water and pans of mud have been provided. 
Numbers of nests have been reported and means of protecting them 
have been adopted. A number of young birds have been cared for until 
able to fly and have then been liberated. Injured birds have been 
restored to health and liberated. Two members of one of the clubs 
ducked a boy who disturbed a robin’s nest until he promised never to 
do so again. A very sad incident happened in the Elizabeth School 
Club, where one of the boys had found a loon’s nest and had tamed the 
young so that he could feed them “wet bread ’’ from his hand. This 
is a rare occurrence, and we began to hope that we might have a 
family of these most active and beautiful of our aquatic birds to en¬ 
liven our park waters. Soon, however, the inevitable hoodlum came 
and shot both loons and carried off the young. One of the ‘ ‘ hardest ’ ’ 
boys in a school did not come in to the first and second meeting of the 
club. The third meeting he stayed and joined the club, and the fourth 
he had something to say about birds he had seen, and recently made 
the following report: He said that he was helping a farmer mow away 
hay and there were a number of swallows’ nests in the barn. The 
man asked him if he would not climb up and knock them down. He 
answered the man, “ We learn at our school that swallows are good 
birds and we have promised to protect their nests all we can, and, if 
you leave their nests alone, they will catch mosquitoes and flies and 
all kinds of insects for you and do your farm lots of good.’’ The man 
