Page:Bird-lore Vol 08.djvu/246

 198 Bird - Lore the hundreds of church towers, the walls and arches of stone, brick and concrete, for which the ancient capital of the world has long been cele- brated, form attractive nesting sites, and Father Tiber is ever there to receive them on his bosom. With an interval of absence in spring, I spent over four months in Italy, from the last of October until the last of June, 1903-04., chiefly at Rome, and in the central provinces. Having walked and driven many miles in the country at the time of the year when birds should abound, I have received but one impression — that Italy has become a land without birds. The Roman Campagna, a rolling plain, framed by mountains, cultivated in ALONG THE ROADS IN FERTILE UMBRIA, WHERE BIRDS ARE SELDOM SEEN Farmer with wooden plough leaving the fields, near Assisi, June 3, 1904 places, is a field of cloth-of-gold in June when the buttercups are in blos- som, but when the Plovers should be piping, and the Larks and the Finches lifting up their voices, it is as silent as its buried villas, its ruined tombs and broken aqueducts, and as nearly destitute of birds as it now is of human inhabitants. The peninsula of Italy forms an important route for the migrants, which, coming from the north and west of Europe, pass the bounds of the Medi- terranean to winter in northern Africa, Egypt and the Nile valley to the Soudan and south of the equator. So the Italians have, for centuries, been killing not only their own birds, but those which belong equally to northern and southern nations. "How to protect our migratory birds," thus becomes a difficult problem