FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
77 
most as directly as he does the Leghorn. 
Again, take the quail. In the vast 
piney woods and wiregrass belt along the 
South Atlantic and Gulf there is noth¬ 
ing for the quail. The mast is scarce 
and precarious, and needs a stouter bill 
than the quail’s, and the wiregrass makes 
no seed. There is not a more hopeless 
region on the continent for birds. But 
man clears away the forest and plants 
corn, and after the corn there comes up 
a jungle of beggarweed, a rich legume 
(Desmodium tortuosum), densely cover¬ 
ing the field, hiding the cattle out of 
sight and even the cornstalks. It cov¬ 
ers the ground with millions of tiny 
beans which nourish flocks of quail and 
make Old Florida the sportsman’s para¬ 
dise in winter. These countless quail 
and many other birds all feed on the 
bounty of man. 
Take the mockingbird, or the mocker, 
as Floridians affectionately call it. 
Primeval Florida had millions of parra- 
keets and other gay-plumaged, harsh¬ 
voiced birds, fit companions for the stoic 
savage; but the sweet singer in its hum¬ 
ble dress, appointed to cheer the lone¬ 
some orange grower, remote in the 
piney woods, awaited his coming. When 
the orange groves were planted they 
took possession of them; they were sat¬ 
isfied and increased greatly. Many a 
night in May and June I have listened 
to their midnight serenade, especially on 
moonlight nights, one answering an¬ 
other in some distant grove, in a wide- 
circling chorus, a polyglot antiphone. 
Then came the disaster of 1895. The 
mocker had seen the orange trees de¬ 
foliated before, but it built its nest with 
cheerful confidence, thinking that the 
leaves would come and cover it from the 
sun. But that spring, the saddest of 
Florida’s history, gloomy alike to man 
and bird, the leaves came no more. I 
had cut down my dismantled trees and 
one morning I stood on my veranda and 
watched the bewildered mockers, search¬ 
ing in a solitary palmetto, in the ivy at 
the chimney top, in the brush piles, for a 
place where they might build. They 
put a nest in a brush heap and laid their 
eggs, but the sun beat down hot on it, 
and they quitted it in disgust. That 
was a lonesome, silent summer in Flor¬ 
ida ; but now the groves are growing up 
and the mockers are heard again. 
The same with the shrike or butcher¬ 
bird. Both he and the mocker delight 
in an orange grove. I believe that their 
number actually diminished that sum¬ 
mer ; that many of them raised no young 
because they had no homes, no orange 
groves. 
In the wise economy of nature, man 
has destroyed the birds he did not need, 
but propagated those that were useful to 
him as consumers of the weed seeds and 
the insects that pillage his crops. The 
pigeons were excellent food, but they re¬ 
quired the beech mast, and beeches grew 
on the richest land which man needed 
for his farms. The pigeons of England 
were once as numerous as in America, 
proportionately, but when the beech¬ 
nuts were gone, as Gilbert White relates, 
they fell to eating turnips, which ruined 
the flavor of their flesh. 
The grouse on the prairies were val¬ 
uable for food, but few in number, for 
prairie grass produced no seeds. 
The spectacular plume-birds of Flor¬ 
ida are gone or rapidly going. Is it not 
just as legitimate to kill one bird for its 
plume as to kill another for its flesh? 
Their beauty pleases man and honors the 
Creator far more when displayed on the 
