Author: Niel Morrow Ladd
Publisher:
Published: 2015-08-05
Total Pages: 74
ISBN-13: 9781332231584
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Excerpt from How to Attract Wild Birds About the Home Men of forty, recalling their childhood, remember that boys then had only one idea when they found a bird's nest - to take the eggs out. If a bird were striking in colors or varity, or for any reason, its distinction was only an added incentive to kill it if possible. Men of forty have seen the wild pigeon, but see it no more. They can scarcely find now one pair of the brilliant, graceful and confiding wood ducks in the romantic haunts where there were hundreds. The handsome cardinal, with his cheery winter whistle, has practically disappeared in many localities where its flashes of color were the commonest sights. In the thousand lovely swales and birch edges of Southern New England the woodcock is now a rare bird save in the few days of migratory "flights," and then there is only a small fraction of the former abundance. The elegant and beautiful brown thrashers, our glorious "sandy mocking bird," nesting too conveniently low for cats and prying human eyes, had, a few years ago, almost disappeared from hundreds of thickets and fence foliage where the boys who are now men of forty could rely on finding them. The dramatic swoops and booms of the nighthawk, beating the coverts of the evening air and sweeping innumerable insects into his curious mouth, open from ear to ear, can be missed through a whole September now; the writer remembers upwards of 200 being bagged in a single sunset "shoot" in Virginia, in his boyhood. Scores of delicate and interesting small bird neighbors, bent only on adding beauty to the world and doing each his bit in ridding us of ugly insect pests, seemed, a few ears ago, to be headed toward the fate of the wild pigeon. But no one has noticed, in this process of bird destruction, any diminution in caterpillars and the scores of varieties of plant-destroying bugs. There has been no lack of tree and plant devouring insect pests of a hundred kinds. Indeed, while anything like a bug census is obviously impracticable, the same general observation which showed us that the birds were decreasing was equally convincing as to the increase, with equal steps, of noxious insects and their ravages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
