Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 231, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1914 — HE CATCHES BIRDS AT SEA [ARTICLE]

HE CATCHES BIRDS AT SEA

Barber on Ocean Liner Uses Whistling Brown Linnet Most Successfully as a Decoy. A,. —— The barber of the Atlantic liner Minnetonka finds a new and profitable pastime in catching wandering birds during the vessel’s voyage across the ocean—his profit arising from the selling of the birds on his arrival in port. All sorts of birds come on board, he says, and he finds a ready sale for many of the rarer specimens. His chief assistant in capturing the birds is a whistling brown linnet, which lures the wanderers l aboard from its cage in an open port. The vagrant flyers alight on hearing its whistle, and presently flutter Inside. Then the port is closed, and the strange birds are soon made “I have caught hundreds of them, and I supply the London zoo regularly,” said the bird catcher. “On a recent homew-ard voyage the linnet lured a snowbird. It was the first one the zoo had been able to secure in 18 years. What the birds require when they first alight on a ship is not food, but water, and it must be boiled. . “Gulls follow a ship all the way across the Atlantic. American gulls are regular convoys .as far as the English channel, where they desert us, and follow a westward bounder home again. The English gulls follow a liner over and back in the same way. The gulls like emigrant ships best, because the more passengers there are the greater the quantity of scraps thrown overboard.”