I can but hope that no reader of this book would ever dream of catching our songsters with birdlime, but there is a form of cruelty of which thousands of ladies are guilty, and against which I, for one, shall never cease to protest until the hateful fashion has entirely ceased. How often I wish I could lead those of my own sex to think of the terrible suffering they are causing to millions of birds as sweet and innocent as my little willow-wren. Can any one conceive my having had her killed and stuffed, and then placed as a trimming on my bonnet! The thought of the willow-wren’s mother-love ought to make such an idea abhorrent to any gentle-minded woman. But cannot my sisters be brought to reflect that every wing and bird’s body they wear on their headgear means the cruel death of a creature of both use and beauty that was enjoying its innocent life, and doing us only good by carrying out its appointed duties in God’s creation? I cannot express the pain it gives me to see aigrettes, wings, and whole birds still so lavishly used in trimming hats and bonnets. Loving birds as I do, I cannot help pleading for them from time to time, in the hope that public opinion may have some influence, and ladies may learn at last to be ashamed to be seen decked with an ornament which proclaims them both thoughtless and unfeeling.
The willow-wren, one of the most useful of our insect-eating birds, abounds in my old garden, and keeps the rose-trees free from aphides and other pests. It chooses very unsafe places for its nest, the smallest tuft of grass being deemed a sufficient shelter. One such nest, I remember, was located two years ago close to the field road where my hay carts were continually passing. The brave little mother seemed to have no fear, but as a heedless footstep might unwittingly have destroyed the nest, some branches were placed round the spot for her protection, and I hope she succeeded in rearing her family.
It is a charming sight to see a party of willow-wrens methodically clearing the insects from a rose-tree. Like a band of tiny acrobats they flit about sideways, upside down, in and out, until every twig has been examined and all the prey secured, then, with happy chirpings, away they flit to the next tree to resume their useful operations.
The sweet, warbling song of this migrant seems a truly summer sound, for the bird seldom arrives until the middle of April, and leaves us again about the end of September; its note therefore suggests sunshine and flowers and the hum of insect-life.
TAME DOVES.
“Was not the Dove the first of all the birds
Loosed by the patriarch from the stranded ark,
Which roved not idly o’er the new-born world,
But backward turn’d, though winds were whistling past—
Though palm-groves and the flowery mead allured—