Page:Bird-lore Vol 08.djvu/256

 ote# from Jfielt) ant) iStutip Bird Tragedies Into the experience of every bird student have come some examples of tragic deaths and accidents to our feathered friends, other than the deaths caused by predatory crea- tures. Often in the migrations birds perish in storms, sometimes in large numbers, as was recorded by Dr. Roberts, of Minnesota, at the last Congress of the American Orni- thologists' Union, in the case of theLapIanc Longspurs, when in a single night in south- ern Minnesota and northern Idaho, accord- ing to a careful estimate, a million birds perished. Again, the search for food, or the nest-building, may lead birds into unforeseen danger which results disastrously. The writer recalls that in the summer of 1903 he and a friend found a nearly complete nest of the Baltimore Oriole from which hung the dead body of the female bird. A horsehair used in the construction had become twisted AMERICAN GOLDFINCH ENTANGLED IN BURDOCK Photographed by B. S. Bowdish about her neck and she had been strangled to death. Last April, Mr. Charles H. Alexander sent to the office of the National Association of Audubon Societies a branch of burdock, to the burs of which the mummified remains of an American Goldfinch were firmly attached, found in Belmont county, Ohio. Seeking the seed, the bird had alighted on something worse than a bird-lime trap. ? ome eighteen years ago the writer remem- jers finding an identical case near Rochester, N.Y., where a Golden-crowned Kinglet was the victim.* Cases where young Barn Swallows become tangled in the horsehairs of the nest-lining and break a leg or are choked to death are not infrequent. It has been widely recorded how the weather during the year 1904 brought disaster to many a bird home and family of young. In many cases, even, the adults were unable to obtain their accustomed insect food, and died in the retreats which they sought from the storms. As in the life experience of man, so in the life of birds, some of the many accidents which befall the birds may easily be averted by man, by means of a little forethought for his "little brothers of the air," and the time will probably come when agriculturists realize that it is for their practical benefit to take such precautions as the furnishing of food and shelter in the winter, the destruc- tion of predatory animals, and the removal of such dangers to the small insect-eating birds, as the burdocks from the fence-rows and waste spots of the farm. — B. S. Bowdish, National Association of Audubon Societies, New York City. Adirondack Notes While on my vacation this summer, at Long Lake in the Adirondacks, I success- fully used, in the identification of numerous recently received from C. C. Warren, White Plains, N. Y., the remains of a Hummingbird which met a similar fate. — Ed. (208)
 * The American Museum of Natural History has