Excerpt from Portraits and Habits of Our Birds, Vol. 2

IT IS a fact well known to field naturalists that in the heavily forested lands of North America comparatively few birds are to be seen. The conditions of life are such that ordinarily far more are found where a portion of the land is under cultivation. The diversified crops, weeds, plants, fruit-bearing shrubs and trees, with their attendant hoards of insects found in and about culti vated regions all tend to make more favorable living conditions for wild birds. In sections, therefore, where open fields are inter spersed with thickets, grown-up fence rows, orchards and small areas of woodlands, and the country traversed with streams, one will generally find bird life more abundant. Then, too, in the set tlements men have destroyed many of the smaller animals and snakes that prey upon birds. Any species of wild life provided with abundant food and insured against an excessive loss from the depredations of its enemies will increase in numbers.

Undoubtedly the farm-land birds of North America have greatly increased since the discovery and settlement of the continent. Only those that could be, and have been, commercialized have sufiered particularly from the hands of man. Passenger Pigeons are extinct because they were shot, trapped and netted to extermina tion for food and for sport. Many game birds have been threat ened with a like fate. Egrets and some other so-called birds of plumage, are rare today because of past demands for their feathers by the millinery trade. Despite the fact that numerous species have largely increased over their former numbers there is yet the greatest need for their still further increase. Our rapidly growing agricultural interests have resulted in vastly enlarging the varieties and numbers of injurious insects that prey upon the growing crop and the harvested products.

The National Association of Audubon Societies is intensely inter ested in this phase of conservation and wishes to use every legitimate means of bringing the subject of protecting our economically valu able birds again and again to the attention of the public. This book, being Volume II of the series which it is hoped to continue, is being brought out and offered at cost in the hope that it will further stimulate interest in American bird protection.

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