But the cause of a great deal of mortality among birds is man’s inhumanity to them. The thirst for blood seems to be inherent in many coarse natures, and as killing a fellow-man is illegal and almost sure to be summarily punished, many men gratify their greed for gore by slaying innocent birds and animals.
“Butchers and villains, bloody cannibals!
How sweet a plant have you untimely cropped!
You have no children, butchers! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.”
The small boy with a sling or a spring-gun or an air-rifle is a source of much grief to the birds. He even kills the tiny kinglets that flit to and fro in the trees bordering our streets, and seems to think it sport. More senseless and wicked still was the fashion in vogue a few years ago, perhaps not yet quite obsolete, which compelled the massacre of thousands of bright-hued birds for feminine—I should say unfeminine—adornment. To say nothing of the “loudness” and bad taste of such a fashion, it is extremely unwise to put birds to death, for no one can compute the number of injurious insects they annually devour. A bird on the bonnet means so much less bread on the table. A bird in the orchard is a sort of scavenger and pomologist combined, and does his share in giving you a dish of fruit for dinner. The scarlet tanager looks like a living ruby in a green tree; but—I speak bluntly—it looks like a chunk of gore on a woman’s bonnet. In behalf of good taste and the birds, I enter my protest against this barbaric custom.
True, birds have elements of the Adamic nature in them. Many of them do relish forbidden fruit, and must be driven off, lest they rifle your cherry-tree; but it is seldom necessary to kill them, even then, especially those that live wholly on insects and fruit.
A correspondent once sent me a number of queries. How do birds come to their “last end”? Do none of them die natural deaths? If they do, why do we never, or at least very rarely, find dead or dying birds in the fields and woods? My response to these questions is: Very few birds die natural deaths,—that is, merely of sickness or old age,—though a few of them may. When a bird becomes feeble or is crippled, it falls an easy prey to a prowling hawk, owl, shrike, eagle, or cat. Should a bird escape all these enemies, and finally lie down and die in a natural way, it would doubtless soon be found and devoured by a carrion-eating fowl or quadruped, and thus its corpse would never be seen by human eyes. Sad indeed it is to think of the numberless ways in which birds meet “the last enemy.”
Be it far from me to use caustic speech against any man or set of men; but it makes me both indignant and sick at heart to read the bloody chronicles of most of the so-called “collectors.” How many embryo birds they slay merely to gratify their morbid craze for gathering “clutches,” as they suggestively call a set of eggs! Not long ago a collector narrated, in an ornithological journal, the harrowing story of his having rifled the nest of a hairy woodpecker five or six times in a single season, the poor bird laying a new deposit after each burglary, until at last she grew suspicious and sought a safer site for her nest. The writer described his part of the performance with apparent gusto, as if he had made a splendid contribution to science! If he must have a collection of hairy woodpecker’s eggs, why not take a single “clutch,” and then leave the bird to make her second deposit and rear her brood in peace?
To my mind, many “professionals” shoot a score of birds where they ought to shoot but one. The long record of slaughtered birds is sickening. The Newgate Calendar scarcely furnishes a parallel. Even our most scientific journals print many of these bloody annals. It is true, a reasonable number of specimens must be collected for scientific purposes, but surely no adequate excuse can be given for shooting hundreds of individuals of the same species merely to have the honor of saying that an astounding number of specimens were “taken.” If the cause of natural history cannot be promoted without destroying the humane instincts of the naturalist himself, the price is too great; it were better left unpaid. A bird in the bush is worth forty in the hand, especially if the forty are dead; worth more, too, I venture to add, to the cause of science itself.