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small birds, and thus become protectors of the very ones they would catch 
if they could. Dr. Forbes’ description of the whole series of forces as 
“pressing one on another like an arrangement of springs, working one 
against another, keeping all in place, thus maintaining the general equi- 
librium and safeguarding the general welfare” is quite apt. 
It is a common position among hunters and sportsmen to say that the 
natural enemies of birds are more destructive than the hunters themselves, 
and that there is no way to increase the birds until those enemies, which 
they speak of as vermin, are first destroyed. However, they lose sight of 
the fact that before the white man came to this country to interfere with 
the balance of nature, there was an abundance of all kinds of wildlife in 
spite of the presence of eagles, hawks, owls, skunks, weasels, raccoons, and 
other foes of the birds far more numerous than now. It cannot be said that 
the natural enemies of the birds had any tendency toward their extinction. 
That was left to man to accomplish by his ruthless killing of the passenger 
pigeon, health hen, and others that were then abundant. At the close of the 
Civil War, during which very little, if any, hunting had been done in the 
southern states, game animals and birds were reported as having greatly 
increased in spite of the same lack of control of the so-called vermin. If 
nature is undisturbed, about all the birds that the land will support will 
be reared unless man comes in to disturb the natural balance. 
One can hardly do better than to quote Dr. Forbush’s comment on 
“Man’s Misdirected Activities,” where he writes: 
“The activities of civilized man in the destruction of predacious animals 
are not always well directed and regulated. Often the activities are guided 
more by prejudice than by knowledge and reason. We destroy the great 
horned owl, the greatest enemy of the crow, and crows become unduly 
numerous and injurious. If we seriously reduce crows, robins, on which 
they prey, probably will become so abundant as to do great injury to small 
fruit, as they have already in some western states. The indiscriminate 
destruction of herons, hawks, owls, crows, skunks, weasels, and other 
enemies of rats, mice and the larger insects is sure to result in great 
periodical increases of such creatures, which are far more dangerous to 
man’s interests than are their enemies, and he is often powerless to check 
their devastating hordes. They never can be checked by humans without 
great effort and expense. In a region devastated by field mice what will 
happen to the eggs and young of game birds that breed upon the ground? 
The climbing wood mice destroy eggs and young of small arboreal birds 
and take birds’ nests for their own use. Birds can rear no young where 
swarming insects ruin every green leaf and blade. If we kill off all the 
large birds, the small birds are powerless before any great irruption of 
insects. When such insects become numerous, the larger wading and 
rapacious birds feed upon them almost exclusively, and because of the much 
greater quantity of food they require are then far more beneficial than the 
smaller birds; also while feeding on abundant, easily obtained insects or 
rodents they have little incentive to prey on smaller birds, which are left 
more free and unmolested also to feed on such pests as they can master. 
Most people will agree that it is imperative in settled regions to extirpate 
