When America was first discovered, here abounded an idealistic sportsman’s paradise. Buffalo, deer, moose, elk, bear, and panther roamed the forests. Geese, duck, brant, swan and wild pigeons flew overhead in countless millions. Practically all have been slaughtered, and the great sport once enjoyed by primeval Nimrods lingers only in a tradition.
The few remaining species of game birds should be vigilantly protected against annihilation, and so propagated that gentlemen will consider the pursuit of the elusive denizens of the brush infinitely preferable to Bacchanal hilarity and that riotous revelry that emasculates all that is noble, pure and godlike in man’s architecture.
The great question of the cause of the prevalence of plant maladies and the problem of the weed control each year grows more harassing to the farmers. The reason for this is simple. Our most beneficial birds, among them doves, robins, field larks and bullbats, have been so ruthlessly destroyed that in less than a generation their numbers have decreased 80 per cent.
When the fact is recalled that the crop of one dove, recently killed in Tennessee, contained over 7,000 weed seeds, and when it is understood that a healthy dove will destroy each feeding day at least 5,000 prospective weeds, more than two negroes, working at $1.50 per day each, could uproot in double the time, it is easy to see, from the tons upon tons of weed seed (besides insects) that this bird would destroy each year, that our cheapest, most efficient hoe hand proves in the end to be the Alabama dove.
As an insect devourer, the bullbat is equally serviceable. Its stomach is elastic and will hold more than that of a pigeon, and its voracity is simply phenomenal, yet its diminutive frame is smaller than that of a “killdee.” The part borne by the bullbat in mosquito destruction, especially in the extermination of the “anopheles,” or malaria-spreading species, transcends the combined work of a case of quinine and a tank of kerosene oil. As a fever germ abater in a malarial district, a flock of bullbats would be worth a grove of quinine trees.
Besides the robin and field lark, already mentioned, both being insect and weed destroyers, there are many other birds that do invaluable work for the farmer without. The ravages made by the dreaded Mexican boll weevil, that devastates cotton fields like a withering simoon, cannot be checked in a surer way than by being obliterated by our insectivorous birds.
If our people could fully appreciate the value of preserving the existing remnant of our birds, without considering its future increase, the halls of our State capitol would resound with an emphatic and peremptory demand for adequate legislation, for the preservation of our birds means little less than the preservation of our agriculture itself. Their extinction would amount practically to wiping out the entire farming interests of our splendid commonwealth.
Statistics incontestably demonstrate the fact that rainfall not only regulates the yield of our plantation, but that it directs and controls the fate of our national politics. When rainfall is light, the people raise poor crops, and are therefore unhappy and discontented. It is then they desire to make a change in the administration of the governmental affairs, and therefore the party in power is deposed. When there is an excess of rainfall abundant crops result and the party in power is retained. Thus it is that, unless speedy legislation is had in order that the insectivorous birds remaining may be retained to do valiant service for their farmer friends, discord will perennially blight the heart of the happy husbandman, and political chaos and turbulence will reign throughout the nation, and the anthems of contentment and cadences of prosperity will not longer pervade the hearts of the honest sons of toil, but will be hushed and swallowed up by the sighs and groans of the imp of insatiate despair.