I loved my dear Bob o’Lincoln, and found out all I could about him. I was delighted to hear that there was a law against the capture of this gayest of songsters, and was interested to know that his kind has quite a wide range—from Utah to Nova Scotia, and from Manitoba to the Amazon. Bobolinks like the North in summer, but sensibly prefer the South in winter, where they have the name of reedbirds or ricebirds. Exasperated farmers down South shoot poor Bob because he and his numerous progeny stuff themselves in fields of rice and oats. However, if it were not for Bob and other insectivorous birds, the grain might never ripen, for in the spring and summer they must subsist largely on the insects that are worse enemies of man than are the birds.
I kept Bob a year or two. The second summer I had him on my farm I listened one day to the wild bobolinks down in the meadow, pouring out their bird hearts in delicious harmonies, then I opened the door of the room where Bob was and recommended him to join those merry fellows in the alders by the river. He sat for an hour or two as if deliberating, then he flew off in a leisurely way, and I saw him no more, but I know quite well that he would join his wild cousins, and when the autumn came, would fly south with them.
I have several other birds in mind that I should like to write about, but I think the story of my pets is already long enough. I shall be satisfied if I have made birds a little more interesting to persons who already love them, and if I cause a few to become interested, who have cared nothing for them. They are exquisite creatures, and the more one studies them the more he finds to admire in them, and the greater number of points of resemblance are there discovered between them and human beings.
There are cruel birds and kind birds, intelligent birds and stupid birds—birds that perhaps do not converse, but that certainly communicate to each other impressions and sensations in a kind of language of their own, and birds that scarcely converse at all. Yet after all, their intelligence is not our intelligence. One gets birds to a certain point, and they go no farther. However, they are eminently suitable as friends and companions for man.
Why is it that we have been so cruel to them? Why is it that the first thought of a bird in the mind of a boy is usually associated with the thought of a gun? Our little brothers and sisters of the air were created for us. They ask only for the privilege of toiling unremittingly for us. Their busy little beaks are from morning till night at the service of their brother man.
We have got to learn better how to appreciate their services. If we do not, there are dark days in store for this nation, for if the birds perish from the face of the earth naturalists tell us that man will perish too.
There are three things we must do—we must take energetic measures to protect, first, our children; secondly, our birds; and thirdly, our forests.
Statisticians tell us that industrial slavery is ruining many children who should become healthy mothers and fathers of families. They also tell us that the lack of protection of insect-eating birds is taking from the pockets of this nation every year the almost inconceivable sum of eight hundred millions of dollars, and that the present frightful waste of wood if not checked, will cause us to be without timber, outside the national forests, in from twenty to forty years.
What are we going to do about it?
Are we to sink still further into the gross, short-sighted materialism of our age, or are we to wish for an awakening and quickening of the old American spirit—the spirit of one small shipload of persons that was, however, strong enough at one time to dominate this continent?