CHAPTER XXVIII THE BIRD PETITION
Before the year 1897 I had become very much alarmed at the prospect of the total extinction of our song-birds. The Bobolink seemed to be disappearing from the field in Massachusetts, the beautiful Summer Red Bird had become extinct, and the Oriole and the Scarlet Tanager had almost disappeared. Many varieties of songbirds which were familiar to my own boyhood were unknown to my children. The same thing seems to be going on in other countries. The famous Italian novelist, Ouida, contributed an article in the North American Review a few years ago in which she described the extermination of the Nightingale in Italy. The Director of the Central Park, in one of his Reports, stated that within fifteen or twenty years the song-birds of the State of New York had diminished forty- five per cent.
One afternoon in the spring of 1897, Governor Claflin called on me at my Committee Room in the Capitol and told me a lady had just visited his daughter at her rooms who had on her head eleven egrets. These egrets are said to come from the female White Heron, a beautiful bird abounding in Florida. They are a sort of bridal ornament, growing out on the head of the female at pairing time and perishing and dropping off after the brood is reared. So the ornament on the horrible woman's head had cost the lives of eleven of these beautiful birds and very likely in every case the lives of a brood of young ones.
When I went home I sat down after dinner and wrote with a pencil the following petition.
_"To the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:
"We, the song-birds of Massachusetts and their playfellows, make this our humble petition:_
"We know more about you than you think we do. We know how good you are. We have hopped about the roofs and looked in at the windows of the homes you have built for poor and sick and hungry people and little lame and deaf and blind children. We have built our nests in the tress and sung many a song as we flew about the gardens and parks you have made so beautiful for your own children, especially your poor children, to play in.
"Every year we fly a great way over the country, keeping all the time where the sun is bright and warm; and we know that whenever you do anything, other people all over the great land between the seas and the great lakes find it out, and pretty soon will try to do the same thing. We know; we know. We are Americans just as you are. Some of us, like some of you, came from across the great sea, but most of the birds like us have lived here a long while; and birds like us welcomed your fathers when they came here many years ago. Our fathers and mothers have always done their best to please your fathers and mothers.
"Now we have a sad story to tell you. Thoughtless or bad people are trying to destroy us. They kill us because our feathers are beautiful. Even pretty and sweet girls, who we should think would be our best friends, kill our brothers and children so that they may wear plumage on their hats. Sometimes people kill us from mere wantonness. Cruel boys destroy our nests and steal our eggs and our young ones. People with guns and snares lie in wait to kill us, as if the place for a bird were not in the sky, alive, but in a shop window or under a glass case. If this goes on much longer, all your song-birds will be gone. Already, we are told, in some other countries that used to be full of birds, they are almost gone. Even the nightingales are being all killed in Italy.
"Now we humbly pray that you will stop all this, and will save us from this sad fate. You have already made a law that no one shall kill a harmless song-bird or destroy our nests or our eggs. Will you please to make another that no one shall wear our feathers, so that no one will kill us to get them? We want them all ourselves. Your pretty girls are pretty enough without them. We are told that it is as easy for you to do it as for Blackbird to whistle.