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well-manicured lawns and neat foundation plantings, 
and starlings, and house sparrows. Perhaps someone 
besides me will miss the red bird, but few will link 
his disappearance with the passing of the thorny osage 
hedge. Maybe a neighbor's cat will take the blame. 
I’m not sure why we have this passion for neat- 
ness. It must stem from the feelings of our forebears 
who labored to create some orderly productivity from 
a wilderness whose orderliness and productivity they 
did not understand. ‘There is a great striving for neat- 
ness in our land. Roadsides must be kept like golf 
courses, interstate rights-of-way must look like parks, 
stream beds must be straight, and neighborhoods must 
be free of unsightly hedges. I'd prefer some tall grass 
on the roadsides and some hedges in the neighborhoods. 
So would dickcissels, meadowlarks, brown thrashers — 
and our cardinal. 
I’ve planted a few small trees in our yard in hopes 
that some day we might have winter breakfasts with 
chickadees, titmice, and cardinals at our window feeder. 
But these few trees, as many as out bit of yard can take, 
will amount to little without the osage hedge at the 
end of the street. 
I’ve been told by an avid bird-lover that I only 
need to put out feed to attract these birds. By such 
reasoning I could attract herring gulls to our suburbs 
if I put out smelt. Our cardinal enjoys proffered sun- 
flower seeds, but he needs the osage hedge more than 
anything else in our neighborhood. If it goes, he goes 
with it. Too few people realize this fact. 
My youngsters and my neighbors’ children need 
to learn that there are values in wild things like our 
cardinal. But more, they need to learn that evolution 
has proceeded by specialization and that the resulting 
animals require specialized places in which to live. We 
must make provision for their special needs by creating 
and maintaining the habitats they require. Otherwise 
they cannot exist. And our lives will not be enriched 
by the values possessed in wild things. In our neighbor- 
hood our cardinal will be gone. 
(The author, James A. Batley, Ph.D., ts a wildlife 
research associate with the Illinois Natural History 
Survey, Urbana, Ill. 61801.) 
