28 THE? AUD 0 5 OtN yee Use eagle 
so they blithely drain or oil sloughs, ponds or swamps one after another. 
In nearly every instance a lovely little oasis of aquatic wild life, which 
has been treasured and often visited by observers of the outdoors, is 
destroyed. Has this ever-increasing part of our citizenship no rights 
at all? In many cases such “improvements” are utterly unnecessary 
because there are either not enough people living in the neighborhood 
to make such drastic measures desirable, or the end wished for could 
have been attained by the simple expedient of placing minnows into 
such water bodies. Why waste so much money and effort? Why ruin 
all such idyllic little spots? When our members hear of such proposals 
let them get busy to contact the men in charge and try to talk it out 
of them. If unsuccessful, let them rouse and organize public sentiment 
against the proposal in the press, through meetings, etc. 
Let us all be up and doing in 1937. 
Our Board of Directors 
The personnel of our board of directors again has undergone con- 
siderable changes due to death or removal from the state. The transfer 
of Mr. Alfred M. Bailey from the Chicago Academy of Sciences to the 
directorship of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, Denver, has 
left a wide gap in the board, as also the death of Mrs. E. T. Baroody. 
Mr. Benjamin T. Gault, the sage of Glen Ellyn, has been forced by 
bodily ailments to absent himself from our meetings. These vacancies 
have been filled by the election of Dr. Howard K. Gloyd, the new Direc- 
tor of the Academy, a well-known herpetologist, ornithologist and all 
round biologist, Mrs. Margaret M. Nice, the outstanding ornithologist, 
Mr. Karl Wright, ornithologist and artist, also of the Academy, and 
Mr. E. T. Baroody, who has been a leading figure in outdoor societies 
of Chicago for some time. Mr. Donald Culross Peattie, who writes the 
‘Breath of the Outdoors” for the Chicago Daily News, had been elected 
some time previously. With so much new blood of such type on the 
board of directors the Illinois Audubon Society should be able to 
accomplish something worth-while. 
The undersigned urged the veteran ornithologist on the board, Mr. 
Benjamin T. Gault, to write some of his reminiscences as a bird ob- 
server in these parts, which, after much persuasion, he consented to do. 
The result is in the present number of the Bulletin (p. 19) and is a 
remarkable human document. It makes one realize once more, and 
from a somewhat different angle than usual, how much conditions have 
changed in our country within the short space of a human life. 
C. W. G. Eirric, President. 
