Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/706

688 regulates and straightens the streams, clears the shrubbery from pastures and meadows and groves, and trims gardens and orchards with a view to the largest crops, the birds can find no homes or nesting-places, and of course can not thrive.

In our neglect of care for birds we have failed to keep in check their natural enemies, which are able to do relatively more damage than ever before. These include four-footed beasts, birds of prey, thieving birds, and our own domestic cats and dogs, with rats; to which may be added the hardships of weather, that bear more severely upon birds than in former times, because of the removal of the sheltering woods under which they could once cover themselves, and the modern bird-killing inventions of telegraph wires and electric lights.

The capture of birds for pets is a factor of a little importance in promoting their disappearance; hunting them as game is a more important one; while the destruction of birds for the sake of their feathers, whereby women may gratify their desire for show, has reached a frightful extent.

Before considering what measures may be taken to obviate the danger of extermination to which birds are exposed, it is proper to inquire what these creatures signify in our economy, and whether their preservation is necessary or desirable.

To my mind, the highest value of our wild birds—I speak of birds in general, while I refer especially to those smaller creatures which we describe as song birds—lies not in the useful service they may do to us, although that is not to be underestimated. I am still of the opinion, which I expressed more than a quarter of a century ago, that their æsthetic influence, the effect they exert upon our spirits and in developing our sense of beauty and our appreciation of all that is pleasant and lively in Nature, is of much higher value. We could hardly imagine a landscape of our country, with its alternations of hill and valley, field and wood, pasture and meadow, threaded with streams or dotted with lakes, not enlivened by nimble birds. How bare and empty would our orchards appear, even in the splendor of their spring bloom, without the twitter, the clear songs, the joyous melodies, and the cries of the robins, bobolinks, cat-birds, and blackbirds that haunt them! For any real enjoyment of Nature, we must have the brisk, songful, and noisy bird-life around us. Further than this, we can not doubt that birds, in freedom as well as living with us in our rooms, may be a means of instruction lasting through life, and exercise a profound influence upon youth, by awaking in them an interest in natural life, and leading them to the enjoyment and love of all that is in Nature, particularly in its animal and bird life, and thus eventually to become students of its works and phenomena. In large cities the birds and the flowers are not