Rensselaer Union, Volume 2, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 July 1870 — In Behalf of the Birds. [ARTICLE]

In Behalf of the Birds.

The great value of birds—such, as the starling, the sparrows, the crows, the jays, etfc.—that feed upon the most destructive kind ot insects, has been, until very recently, unappreciated. Most of them have been treated as outlaws, and in repayment for their signal services have been neglected or persecuted, until the unchecked and enormous increase of the most noxious insects, throughout the continent of Europe, has become a subject of well -founded alarm calling for the intervention of government, both for their immediate destruction and for the protection of those birds that feed upon them. From these facts two prominent conclusions have been pretty surely reached: first, that birds are indispensable to European agriculture; and second, that those birds most generally protected and known as the “ useful binds” are as a general thing of very little service in arresting the increase of those insects the ravages of which are the most to be dreaded, These lessons are as significant to us of America as to the agri -ulturists of Europe. When will our intelligent farmers awaken both to their danger and the only remedy ? An agricultural journal, the Bund, published in Berne, with much ability and force demonstrates that the enormous losses befalling European agriculture can only be arrested when man himself shall not only cease to disturb the great equipoise of nature, and no longer in mere wantonness, prejudice, superstition, or on other equally worthless grounds, persecute and destroy the natural exterminators of insects, but instead shall extend to them the greatest possible protection, even to the nourishing and caring for them in the wintry season. While this same journal finds much to rejoice at in cantonal laws for the protection of useful birds, and yet more in the general spirit in which they are observed, it urges greater attention to instruction upon these subjects in schools, and dwells with much pertinence upon the radical incompleteness of the laws. The following is as well adapted to our own meridian as to that of Switzerland : “ For example, when we see the sparrow (which has been acclimated at such great expense in America), the crow, the raven, and others of our most useful birds still outlawed in individual cantons; when we see the hunting of our singing birds still allowed at certain seasons in others, and that protection is only given to the smaller birds, omitting the far more useful owls, buzzards, and jackdaws, we can but admit the incompleteness of our enactments, and are forced to an earnest wish that in all those cantons where this half legislation exists, a cfiange may socm hsunadc-ftat. shall place them more in conformity with the present standpoint of science."

These exhortations are pregnant with meaning and with warning to us, for we stand even more than the writer’s countrymen in need of intelligent legislation, and far more in need of careful investigation, the diffusion of light, and the dissemination of truth. These words of the Bund would surely demonstrate that the farmer’s best friends are the very birds he now most frequently persecutes. They stand between his crops and their destroyers. They are his standing army, his police force. Their admirable powers of flight, their yet more wonderful gifts of vision, and their instinctive enmity to his foes, most marvelously adapt them to do duty in a field where man himself is powerless.—Atlantic Monthly.