BY THE WAYSIDE 
34 
especially is this true of birds that 
are able to change their locality with 
great facility. It, is doubtful if there 
is another locality where the Canada 
jay and its congeners visit in winter, 
where the mocking bird nests in sum¬ 
mer, or another where the liawk-owl 
flies silently over the spot occupied 
during the warmer days by the summer 
red-bird and the yellow-breasted chat. 
But the axe has already leveled much 
of the woods, so there is perceivable 
a falling off in the number of our old 
familiar friends. ’ ’ 
We care little for the past. But 
what of the present ? Most of you will 
say that the birds are all gone—at least 
in the city. Sparrows are about all 
there is left. 
Unquestionably, some of our old 
friends are gone, and never to return. 
But are not many of us so busy look¬ 
ing for other things that we fail to see 
but a small part of what treasure we 
have left. We hold dollars so close to 
our eyes that it is difficult to see any¬ 
thing else. 
Our grain and seed eating birds have 
suffered the greatest decrease. This is 
not, as is generally claimed, due to the 
bad boy who steals birds’ eggs. Nor 
is it due to the hawks, the owls, the 
weasels, the skunks, or the foxes, 
whose natural rights to a meal of fur 
and feathers is unquestionable—nor 
even to that least excusable destroyer, 
the sportsman and hunter, who too 
often kills wantonly, sometimes for the 
mere lust for killing something, or to 
exhibit his skill as a destroyer. 
The radical changes and almost to¬ 
tal destruction of the native seed and 
fruit-bearing plants of the country are 
unavoidable and are incidental to the 
changes from a wild to a civilized 
country. It is so with the birds. 
The fact that the food supply of our 
winter birds has enormously de¬ 
creased and at times almost totally cut 
off is evident to the most careless ob¬ 
server. It is a well known fact that, 
the strength of a cable is equal only 
to its weakest part. So is it that in all 
distributions of life, continuity can 
never exceed the lowest ebb of its food 
supply. 
Let us go back thirty or forty yearsj 
or so and see what our winter birds j 
had to live upon. Almost every pas¬ 
ture had its cluster of briar patches 
and hazel brush so thick that a rab¬ 
bit scarcely could make passage 
through them. The many berries, the, 
wild grapes, the shrubs, the vines 
loaded with sundry fruits; then there 
were the hundreds and thousands of 
species of native seed-bearing plants— j 
from the giant sunflowers down 
through the list of coneflowers, black- 
eyed susans, painted cups, bush clovers, 
asters, golden-rods, ad infinitum. Then 
there were thousands of acres of stub¬ 
ble fields, with here and there strips 
and patches of uncut grain. Corn¬ 
fields were not always cut and shocked 
In those days. And when they were, 
they weren’t often husked until the 
following Spring. 
What are the conditions today? 
The old rail fences are gone, with 
their impenetrable hedges of brush and 
vine and weed. Intense farming util¬ 
izes every square rod of land, ninety 
per cent in bulk of our pasture, and 
hay plants consist of three species only 
—timothy, clover and June grass—no 
one of which is allowed to seed unless 
the seed is gathered. 
Even if quails and prairie-chickens 
could hibernate in snow, there would 
not be dead grass enough on an up-to- 
date farm to enable them to build their 
nests. With the smaller seed-eating 
winter birds the same condition pre- 
