Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 August 1895 — Eating up the Birds. [ARTICLE]

Eating up the Birds.

To the Italian everything is edible; it is a nation without a palate. It steeps a hare in fennel and eats salt with melons. The craze for devouring birds of all kinds is a specie of fury frorn the Alps to Etna; they crunch the delicate bodies between their jaws with disgusting relish and a lark represents to them a succulent morsel for the spit or pastry. The trade in larks all over the world is enormous and execrable, and is as large in England as in Italy. It should at once be made penal by heavy fines on the trappers, the venders, and the eaters, or, ere long, no more will the lark be heard on earth. It is admitted by all who know anything on the subject that agriculture would be impossible without the aid of birds, as the larvae and developed insects of *ll kinds would make a desert of the entire area of cultivated land.

This is well known. Yet, all over the world the destruction of birds rages unchecked and no attempt is made to protect them, to interdict their public sale and to enable them to nest and rear their young in peace. A scientific writer has said that destruction of the individual is umimportant. (He was speaking of the destruction of the great auk.) As matters go now,unless some stringent measures are taken the birds of Europe will, in the next century, be as extinct as is now the dinornis. The ornithopil societies of France and Switzerland have more than once written that unless the birds be protected in Italy they must perish all over Europe, since so great a variety of races wing their way to the south in winter and there are ruthlessly murdered.