THE RIGHT WAY TO GO BIRDS'-NESTING.
A man who studies birds is called an ornithologist. Mark Twain, the amusing yet kind-hearted American writer, says:
"There are fellows who write books about birds and love them so much that they'll go hungry and tired to find a new kind of bird—and kill it.
"They are called 'ornithologers.'
"I could have been an 'ornithologer' myself, because I always loved birds and creatures. And I started out to learn how to be one. I saw a bird sitting on a dead limb of a high tree, singing away with his head tilted back and his mouth open—and, before I thought, I fired my gun at him; his song stopped all suddenly, and he fell from the branch, limp like a rag, and I ran and picked him up—and he was dead. His body was warm in my hand, and his head rolled about this way and that, like as if his neck was broke, and there was a white skin over his eyes, and one drop of red blood sparkled on the side of his head-and-laws! I couldn't see nothing for the tears."
"I haven't ever murdered no creature since then that warn't doing me no harm—and I ain't agoing to neither."
A good Scout is generally a good "ornithologer," as Mark Twain calls him. That is to say, he likes stalking birds and watching all that they do. He discovers, by watching them, where and how they build their nests.
He does not, like the ordinary boy, want to go and rob them of their eggs, but he likes to watch how they hatch out their young and teach them to feed themselves and to fly. He gets to know every species of bird by its call and by its way of flying; and he knows which birds remain all the year round and which only come at certain seasons; and what kind of food they like best, and how they change their plumage, what sort of nests they build, where they build them, and what the eggs are like.
A good many birds are almost dying out in Great Britain, because so many boys bag all their eggs when they find their nests.
Birds'-nesting is very like big-game shooting—you look out in places that, as a hunter, you know are likely haunts of the birds you want; you watch the birds fly in and out and you find the nest. But you do not then go and destroy the nest and take all the eggs. If you are actually a collector, take one egg and leave the rest, and, above all, don't pull the nest about, otherwise the parent birds will desert it, and all those eggs, which might have developed into jolly young birds will be wasted.