The Committee on Wild Life Protection wishes to call the attention of the Congress to the enormous losses that are being inflicted upon the farming and fruit-growing interests of the United States through the destruction of insect-eating birds. While the main facts of the situation are known to many persons, the mass of the people of the United States are sound asleep on this subject. The 5,000,000 men and boys who are slaughtering our birds are levying tribute on every American pocketbook. An immense number of birds of great economic value are being slaughtered annually, and many of our most useful and valuable bird species are on the toboggan slide toward extermination. The destruction of our insect-eating birds means a great increase in the armies of destructive insects, a great decrease in our agricultural products, and a great loss to consumers and to farmers. The value of the birds destroyed as “game” and for “food” is declared to be not equal to one-thousandth of the value they would save to the national wealth, if permitted to live.
The committee will distribute a campaign circular containing a table of figures showing the annual losses to the people of the United States by insect pests. Those figures were taken from an official report published in the “Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture.” The farmers who grow cereal crops lose about $200,000,000 per annum. The fruit-growers lose $27,000,000 per annum. Hay loses $53,000,000; cotton, $60,000,000; and truck crops, $53,000,000.
The committee’s circular gives the cost of certain insects per species to the people of the United States. For example, the codling moth and curculio apple pests cost the American people $8,250,000 a year for spraying operations, and $12,000,000 per year in annual shrinkage in the apple crop. The chinch bug wheat pest sometimes costs $20,000,000 per year, and the cotton boll weevil the same amount. The tree insect pests damage trees and timber to a total of $100,000,000 a year.
Your committee contends that the American people do not realize that scores of species of the birds that sportsmen and pot-hunters are regularly allowed to shoot for sport are of immense value to agriculture. How many men are there out of every thousand who know that at least thirty species of shore birds feed upon noxious insects, and are immensely valuable to our agricultural industries? The gunners who shoot legally are destroying 154 species of birds that legally are classed as game birds, even in the North.
Very few Americans out of every thousand know the immense value of our song birds, swallows, woodpeckers, blackbirds, quail, doves and nighthawks in destroying countless millions of noxious insects.
THE LOGICAL CONCLUSION.
In view of the decrease already accomplished in the general volume of the bird life of America, in view of the enormous losses annually inflicted upon the people of this country by the ravages of insects, and in view of the destruction of wild life that now is furiously proceeding throughout all America, the McLean bill, now before Congress, to provide Federal protection for all migratory birds, becomes the most important wild life measure that ever came before the Congress of the United States in any form. In view of the annual losses to the wealth of this country that will continue so long as the McLean bill fails to pass, it is impossible for any one to put forth one good reason, unless it be on purely technical grounds, against that measure. By the inexorable logic of the situation, any man who opposes the enactment of a law for the Federal protection of migratory birds becomes by that opposition an enemy to the public welfare. The bills introduced in Congress by Representatives Weeks and Anthony have dragged long enough. They provided for the protection of migratory game birds, only. Now it is time to strengthen their proposition, as Senator McLean has done, by providing also for the protection of all the migratory insectivorous birds.
Unless the people of America wish to shut their eyes to their own interests, and pay out millions of dollars annually in the form of increased cost of living, they should arouse from their lethargy and put up to Congress such a demand for the passage of the McLean bill that it will be enacted into law at the next session of Congress. It is Senate Bill No. 6497, and on the Senate calendar it is No. 606. We can not afford to wait until 1914 or 1915; and Congress has full power to act next winter.
How many people in the North know that the negroes and poor whites of the South annually slaughter millions of valuable insect-eating birds for food? Around Avery Island, Louisiana, during the robin season (in January when the berries are ripe), Mr. E. A. McIlhenny says that during ten days or two weeks, at least 10,000 robins are each day slaughtered for the pot. “Every negro man and boy who can raise a gun is after them!”
There are seven States in which the robin is regularly and legally being killed as game! They are Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Florida.