Our Vanishing Wild Life Part 18

Beyond question, the highest sentiments of humanity are those that are stirred by the misfortunes of killable game. During the past thirty years, I have noticed some interesting manifestations of the increased sympathy for wild creatures that steadily is growing in a large section of the public mind. Thirty years ago, the appearance of a deer or moose in the streets of any eastern village nearly always was in itself a signal for a grand chase of the unfortunate creature, and its speedy slaughter. Today, in the eastern states, the general feeling is quite different. The appearance of a deer in the Hudson River itself, or a moose in a Maine village is a signal, not for a wild chase and cruel slaughter, but for a general effort to save the animal from being hurt, or killed. I know this through ocular proof, at least half a dozen lost and bewildered deer having been carefully driven into yards, or barns, and humanely kept and cared for until they could be s.h.i.+pped to us.

Several have been caught while swimming in the Hudson, bewildered and panic-stricken. The latest capture occurred in New York City itself.

A puma that escaped (about 1902) from the Zoological Park, instead of being shot was captured by sensible people in the hamlet of Bronxdale, alive and unhurt, and safely returned to us.

In some portions of the east, though not all, the day of the hue and cry over "a wild animal in town" seems to be about over. On Long Island some humane persons found an injured turkey vulture, and took it in and cared for it,--only to be persecuted by ill-advised game wardens, because they had a forbidden wild bird "in their possession!" There are times when it is the highest (moral) duty of a game warden to follow the advice of Private Mulvaney to the "orficer boy," and "Shut yer oye to the rigulations, sorr!"

Such occurrences as these are becoming more and more common. _The desire of "the great silent majority" is to SAVE the wild creatures_; and it is in response to that sentiment that thousands of people are today in the field against the Army of Destruction.

It is the duty of every sportsman to a.s.sist in promoting the pa.s.sage of a law like our New York law which empowers the State Game Commission to throw extra protection around any species that has been slaughtered too much by snow or by firearms, by closing the open season as long as may be necessary. Can there be in all America even one thinking, reasoning being who can not see the justice and also the imperative necessity of this measure? It seems impossible.

Give the game the benefit of every doubt! If it becomes too thick, your gun can quickly thin it out; but if it is once exterminated, it will be impossible to bring it back. Be wise; and take thought for the morrow.

Remember the heath hen.

SLAUGHTER OF BLUEBIRDS.--In the late winter and early spring of 1896 the wave of bluebirds was caught on its northward migration by a period of unseasonably cold and fearfully tempestuous weather, involving much icy-cold rain and sleet. Now, there is no other climatic condition that is so hard for a wild bird or mammal to withstand as rain at the freezing point, and a mantle of ice or frozen snow over all supplies of food.

The bluebirds perished by thousands. The loss occurred practically all along their east-and-west line of migration, from Arkansas to the Atlantic Coast. In places the species seemed almost exterminated; and it was several years ere it recovered to a point even faintly approximating its original population. I am quite certain that the species never has recovered more than 50 per cent of the number that existed previous to the calamity.

DUCK CHOLERA IN THE BRONX RIVER.--In 1911, some unknown but new and particularly deadly element, probably introduced in sewage, contaminated the waters of Bronx River where it flows through New York City, with results very fatal in the Zoological Park. The large flock of mallard ducks, Canada geese, and snow geese on Lake Aga.s.siz was completely wiped out. In all about 125 waterfowl died in rapid succession, from causes commonly cla.s.sed under the popular name of "duck cholera." The disease was carried to other bodies of water in the Park that were fed from other sources, but made no headway elsewhere than on lakes fed by the polluted Bronx River.

Fortunately the work of the Bronx River Parkway Commission soon will terminate the present very unsanitary condition of that stream.

WILD DUCKS IN DISTRESS.--In the winter of 1911-12, many flocks of wild ducks decided to winter in the North. Many persons believe that this was largely due to the prevention of late winter and spring shooting; which seems reasonable. Unfortunately the winter referred to proved exceptionally severe and formed vast sheets of thick ice over the feeding-grounds where the ducks had expected to obtain their food. On Cayuga, Seneca and other lakes in central New York, and on the island of Martha's Vineyard, the flocks of ducks suffered very severely, and many perished of hunger and cold. _But for the laws prohibiting late winter shooting undoubtedly all of them would have been shot and eaten, regardless of their distress_.

Game wardens and humane citizens made numerous efforts to feed the starving flocks, and many ducks were saved in that way. An ill.u.s.trated article on the distressed ducks of Keuka Lake, by C. William Beebe and Verdi Burtch, appeared in the _Zoological Society Bulletin_ for May, 1912. Fortunately there is every reason to believe that such occurrences will be rare.

WILD SWANS SWEPT OVER NIAGARA FALLS.--During the past ten years, several winter tragedies to birds have occurred on a large scale at Niagara Falls. Whole flocks of whistling swans of from 20 up to 70 individuals alighting in the Niagara River above the rapids have permitted themselves to float down into the rapids, and be swept over the Falls, en ma.s.se. On each occasion, the great majority of the birds were drowned, or killed on the rocks. Of the very few that survived, few if any were able to rise and fly out of the gorge below the Falls to safety. It is my impression that about 200 swans recently have perished in this strange way.

CHAPTER XI

SLAUGHTER OF SONG-BIRDS BY ITALIANS

In these days of wild-life slaughter, we hear much of death and destruction. Before our eyes there continually arise photographs of hanging ma.s.ses of waterfowl, grouse, pheasants, deer and fish, usually supported in true heraldic fas.h.i.+on by the men who slew them and the implements of slaughter. The world has become somewhat hardened to these things, because the victims are cla.s.sed as game; and in the destruction of game, one game-bag more or less "Will not count in the news of the battle."

The slaughter of song, insectivorous and all other birds by Italians and other aliens from southern Europe has become a scourge to the bird life of this country. The devilish work of the negroes and poor whites of the South will be considered in the next chapter. In Italy, linnets and sparrows are "game"; and so is everything else that wears feathers!

Italy is a continuous slaughtering-ground for the migratory birds of Europe, and as such it is an international nuisance and a pest. The way pa.s.serine birds are killed and eaten in that country is a disgrace to the government of Italy, and a standing reproach to the throne. Even kings and parliaments have no right in moral or international law to permit year after year the wholesale slaughter of birds of pa.s.sage of species that no civilized man has a right to kill.

There are some tales of slaughter from which every properly-balanced Christian mind is bound to recoil with horror. One such tale has recently been given to us in the pages of the _Avicultural Magazine_, of London, for January, 1912, by Mr. Hubert D. Astley, F.Z.S., whose word no man will dispute. In condensing it, let us call it

THE ITALIAN SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

This story does not concern game birds of any kind. Quite the contrary.

That it should be published in America, a land now rapidly filling up with Italians, is a painful necessity in order that the people of America may be enabled accurately to measure the fatherland traditions and the fixed mental att.i.tude of Italians generally toward our song birds. I shall now hold a mirror up to Italian nature. If the image is either hideous or grotesque, the fault will not be mine. I specially commend the picture to the notice of American game wardens and judges on the bench.

The American reader must be reminded that the Italian peninsula reaches out a long arm of land into the Mediterranean Sea for several hundred miles toward the sunny Barbary coast of North Africa. This great southward highway has been chosen by the birds of central Europe as their favorite migration route. Especially is this true of the small song-birds with weak wings and a minimum of power for long-sustained flight. Naturally, they follow the peninsula down to the Italian Land's End before they launch forth to dare the pa.s.sage of the Mediterranean.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ITALIAN ROCCOLO, ON LAKE COMO A Death-Trap for Song-Birds. From the Avicultural Magazine]

Italy is the narrow end of a great continental funnel, into the wide northern end of which Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland annually pour their volume of migratory bird life. And what is the result? For answer let us take the testimony of two reliable witnesses, and file it for use on the day when Tony Macchewin, gun in hand and pockets bulging with cartridges, goes afield in our country and opens fire on our birds.

The linnet is one of the sweet singers of Europe. It is a small, delicately formed, weak-winged little bird, about the size of our phoebe-bird. It weighs only a trifle more than a girl's love-letter.

Where it breeds and rears its young, in Germany for example, a true sportsman would no more think of shooting a linnet than he would of killing and eating his daughter's dearest canary.

To the migrating bird, the approach to northern Italy, either going or returning, is not through a land of plenty. The sheltering forests have mostly been swept away, and safe shelters for small birds are very rare.

In the open, there are owls and hawks; and the only refuge from either is the thick-leafed grove, into which linnets and pipits can dive at the approach of danger and quickly hide.

A linnet from the North after days of dangerous travel finally reached Lake Como, southward bound. The country was much too open for safety, and its first impulse was to look about for safe shelter. The low bushes that spa.r.s.ely covered the steep hillsides were too thin for refuge in times of sudden danger.

Ah! Upon a hilltop is a little grove of trees, green and inviting. In the grove a bird is calling, calling, insistently. The trees are very small; but they seem to stand thickly together, and their foliage should afford a haven from both hawk and gunner. To it joyously flits the tired linnet. As it perches aloft upon a convenient whip-like wand, it notices for the first time a queer, square brick tower of small dimensions, rising in the center of a court-yard surrounded by trees. The tower is like an old and dingy turret that has been shorn from a castle, and set on the hilltop without apparent reason. It is two stories in height, with one window, dingy and uninviting. A door opens into its base.

Several birds that seem very near, but are invisible, frequently call and chirp, as if seeking answering calls and companions.h.i.+p. Surely the grove must be a safe place for birds, or they would not be here.

Hark! A whirring, whistling sound fills the air, like the air tone of a flying hawk's wings. A hawk! A hawk!

Down plunges the scared linnet, blindly, frantically, into the s.p.a.ce sheltered by the grove!

Horrors! What is this?

Threads! Invisible, interlacing threads; tangled and full of pockets, treacherously spanning the open s.p.a.ce. It is a fowler's net! The linnet is entangled. It flutters frantically but helplessly, and hangs there, caught. Its alarm cry is frantically answered by the two strange, invisible bird voices that come from the top of the tower!

The grove and the tower are A ROCCOLO! A huge, permanent, merciless, deadly _trap_, for the wholesale capture of songbirds! The tower is the hiding place of the fowler, and the calling birds are decoy birds whose eyes have been totally blinded by red-hot wires in order that they will call more frantically than birds with eyes would do. The whistling wings that seemed a hawk were a sham, made by a racquet thrown through the air by the fowler, through a slot in his tower. He keeps by him many such racquets.

The door of the tower opens, and out comes the fowler. He is lowbrowed, swarthy, ill kept, and wears rings in his ears. A soiled hand seizes the struggling linnet, and drags it violently from the threads that entangled it. A sharp-pointed twig is thrust straight through the head of the helpless victim _at the eyes_, and after one wild, fluttering agony--it is dead.

The fowler sighs contentedly, re-enters his dirty and foul-smelling tower, tosses the feathered atom upon the pile of dead birds that lies upon the dirty floor in a dirty corner,--and is ready for the next one.

Ask him, as did Mr. Astley, and he will tell you frankly that there are about 150 dead birds in the pile,--starlings, sparrows, linnets, greenfinches, chaffinches, goldfinches, hawfinches, redstarts, blackcaps, robins, song thrushes, blackbirds, blue and coal t.i.ts, fieldfares and redwings. He will tell you also, that there are _seven other roccolos within sight and twelve within easy walking distance_. He will tell you, as he did Mr. Astley, that during that week he had taken about 500 birds, and that that number was a fair average for each of the 12 other roccolos.

This means the destruction of about 5,000 songbirds per week _in that neighborhood alone!_ Another keeper of a roccolo told Mr. Astley that during the previous autumn he took about 10,000 birds at his small and comparatively insignificant roccolo.

And above that awful roccolo of slaughtered innocents rose _a wooden cross_, in memory of Christ, the Merciful, the Compa.s.sionate!

Around the interior of the entwined sapling tops that formed the fatal bower of death there hung a semicircle of tiny cages containing live decoys,--chaffinches, hawfinches, t.i.tmice and several other species.

"The older and staider ones call repeatedly," says Mr. Astley, "and the chaffinches break into song. It is the only song to be heard in Italy at the time of the autum migration."

And the King of Italy, the Queen of Italy, the Parliament of Italy and His Holiness the Pope permit these things, year in and year out. It is now said, however, that through the efforts of a recently organized bird-lovers' society in Italy, the blinding of decoy birds for roccolos is to be stopped.

In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the protection of these birds during their breeding season must be very effective, for otherwise the supply for the Italian slaughter of the Innocents would long ago have fallen to nothing.

The Germans love birds, and all wild life. I wonder how they like the Italian roccolo. I wonder how France regards it; and whether the nations of Europe north of Italy will endure this situation forever.

To the American and English reader, comment on the practices recorded above is quite unnecessary, except the observation that they betoken a callousness of feeling and a depth of cruelty and destructiveness to which, so far as known, no savages ever yet have sunk. As an exhibit of the groveling pusillanimity of the human soul, the roccolo of northern Italy reveals minus qualities which can not be expressed either in words or in figures.

And what is the final exhibit of the gallant knight of the roccolo, the feudal lord of the modern castle and its retainers?