Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 July 1893 — Exterminating Our Birds. [ARTICLE]

Exterminating Our Birds.

Mr. John Worth, in The Nineteenth Ctntury, gives some striking facts about the rapid extermination of the birds of North America. The advent of the plough and the frame hut of the settler is gradually, driving the feathered tribe from its old haunts, and what nests are spared by the plough are too often destroyed by prairie fires. The heath hen used to be s*<en in autumn in packs of from 100 to 2<X) birds in each; now the number in a csvey rarely exceeds six or eight. The sharp-tailed grouse and the wild turkey w ill soon follow the bison and the moose into the animalia of the past. Professor Honey asserts in the Chicago Field that in one of the vast breeding colonies alone pome 1,000.000,000 pigeons were “sacrificed to Mammon ” during one nesting season, and even allowing for tion the extent of the slaughter is beyond question. The remedy is not easy to seek. Mr. Worth suggests an act of Congress to prevent bird destruction throughout the United States.