The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-10-05

ditch away the waters of ponds and
 lakes; but after that look in vain for snipe and duck. DDestroy the thickets and briery tangles (they are unsightly ana unprofitable on the farm), no mat ter how necessary they are to the quail and then look in vain for beyies \ in the neatly shorn fields Your blue
 birds, that once had the old worm fences with hollow stakes to build in,
 cannot accept barbed-wire substi- ute; where shall their nests be hidden?
 What are the gay woodpeckers to do when you carefully cut away and burn every dead tree and bough?
 Every summer am more and more curious to know how the meadow lark survives, how it succeeds in rearing
 brood, when year by year the mead oWs in which it builds are cut closer and closer with the changing moving machine, and when the seeds it loves are not permitted to ripen. Where do the quails find winter shelter on our highly cultivated and smoothly shorn farms? The food of the wild pigeon is gone, and gone forever are the count less hosts of pigeons. When l was child the beautiful and magnificent log cock was everywhere seen in the woods of our country. Now it is rare, save in few remote wildernesses. Why? Be- cause the rotten wood in which it's food is found has been long ago made into heaps and burned by the sturdy men who have caused farms and planta- tions to supersede the forests.
 In the old days of bramble tangles ', bevies Lately I have seen sixteen quails as stiff as icicles in a pitiful lit- tie cluster where, all unprotected, the zero weather had caught them, as Ten nyson has it, in it's frozen palms" Then the hungry hawks have their will of birds where there is no thick cover for them to hide in, and the farmhouse cats, proving from field to field and from orchard to orchard, devour every f1edgling that they can find By night the owls hunt with the cats. The farmers pigs, nosing everywhere, eat up the eggs of all birds that nest on the ground
 It is true that the plum -gatherers have killed thousands of herons, but the farmers drains--the canals and covered ditches whereby vast areas of
 watery feeding grounds have been made dry-have killed millions. Fifty years ago the sloppy prairies and queachy boglands of Illinois, Iowa, h. diana, Michigan and Ohio were the haunts of countless swarms of migra- ting herons, geese, brant, duck and crane. Now very few are seen. be- cause this intermediate resting and feeding ground has been unavailable for years. Even the small herons and bitterns, never much shot, are becom- ing scarce for the same reason. Hun
 dreds of small streams once in their feeding and breeding places are now dry as bone. Not long ago I revisited a spot where formerly the wood ducks bred. I found that the wood and the
 pond had disappeared and there grew a vast field of corn.
 Give wild things the least bit of will derness and they will survive in spite of nature and man. The other day a wildcat attacked a child in one of the
 oldest settled parts of Indiana. It came out of an unreclaimed ravine on the banks of the Ohio river. I saw a lone log-cock in a considerable wood of the Kankakee region few years ago.
 But you cannot save the birds and at
 the same time starve them and refuse them both nesting-places and shelter from the cold. Womens hats and mems guns are hard on birds, but civil lized doings are harder on them. En- frightened farming, the making of pro- ductive and neatly shore estates, the l march of the plough. the ditching-ma
 chine the underground tile, the patent reaper and mower and thresher, the
 cats, the dogs, the hawks, the owls,
 winter without shelter, summer with out food spring without nesting-places -these are the agencies that are de-
 stroying birds by the wholesale. And
 then there is the English sparrow, a
 murrain seize him! What is left he takes,--Maurice Thompson in the Inde- | pendent.