that which, by no possible outlay of time or labour or money could 
man do for himself. Man, the greediest of all animals, not only 
grudges every mouthful that could go down his own throat, 
grudges the expense and trouble required to net his fruit, to 
black-cotton his seeds, to provide water or wild fruit bushes or 
sunflowers about his fruit gardens—simple expedients recommended 
by practical professional cultivators—or to “scare” his fields, but 
he appropriates to himself whatever wild berry he may fancy with¬ 
out the smallest compensation to the wild creatures whose 
sustenance he takes. 
It should be remembered, moreover, that whether the adult 
bird be mainly insectivorous or mainly vegetarian in taste, the 
young are fed almost entirely on animal food, for this is the period 
of hungry growth, when the most condensed and strengthening 
food—the proteids and hydro-carbons—are needed. At any time 
the bird’s appetite is great, for its food has to support an intensely 
quick, bright, passiona/te, little life, incomparably active and 
volatile, and to supply fuel for the hot blood circulating from a 
heart that beats twice as fast as the heart of sluggish man. A 
young robin has been known to eat its own weight of food 
in twenty-four hours, which is as though your growing boy 
were to require six or seven stone of bread and meat in a 
day. 
And where the young animal has milk and patent foods, the 
young bird has grubs and caterpillars. The number of these 
required to fill all the gaping little mouths in all the nests through¬ 
out the country in early summer defies imagination, when we are 
told by naturalists of old birds flying to the nest 200, 400, and 500 
times a day, with a mouthful of insects at each visit; and when we 
consider that there are far more birds then than at any other time 
of the year, since an enormous percentage of fledglings perishes 
from one cause or another. 
“Man cannot live without the bird,” said Michelet to a country 
which meditated the experiment and found out its mistake. And 
whatever the growl at certain seasons and against certain birds, 
men are more and more coming to the conclusion that Michelet 
was right. The farmer is learning to know his friend — the 
“ winged wardens ” of the farm; large growers whose fruit and 
jams are famed all over the country are strong supporters of 
protection laws; and practical gardeners, who have superintended 
some of the greatest gardens in England for twenty, thirty, and 
forty years, are fervent believers in feathered labour. As know¬ 
ledge of the lives and ways of the wild folk increases we may expect 
to find all tillers of the soil upholding the broad principles of the 
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. 
