Birds worth knowing
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| Birds worth knowing |
From introduction:
As Several hundred thousand readers have been kind enough to approve the author's four previous volumes on birds, it has been suggested that a single volume might be helpful, dealing with the birds most worth knowing and chosen by the author from these writings with the view of interesting an ever-widening circle of new friends in the most appealing form of wildlife there is still left about us.
An immense wave of interest in birds recently swept over the coimtry were less than a generation ago was complete indifference to their extermination. Why this change in people's thoughts?
Largely as the logical result of persistent and highly intelligent educative work by the Audubon Societies, directed by scientific and altruistic men and women, in reaching school children, clubs of many kinds, granges, editors, and legislators.
Vast quantities of well-written pamphlets and beautiful colored pictures, such as are used to illustrate this book, are distributed annually; bird dubs are actively at work all over the country; Junior Audubon classes graduate fresh recruits; wardens are safeguarding the breeding grounds of the egret, gull, tern, eider, and other birds dangerously near the vanishing point; bird sanctuaries have been established in countless parks, cemeteries, private estates, and public domains; the making of bird houses, fountains, and restaurants has suddenly become a well-advertised business as well as a pastime for every boy and girl who can handle a hammer; people are planting trees, shrubs, and vines especially to attract birds and they systematically feed them all winter.
Audubon field agents are lecturing, disseminating literature, button- holing legislators, and looking out for the birds' interests generally in State and National Capitols, interests now backed up by intelligent public opinion so strong as to make the ultimate passage of protective laws in every state of the Union a foregone conclusion.
The National Conscience was awakened by the demonstration of the birds' vast economic value to the country; with the widespread interest now taken in birds as important factors in our agricultural wealth comes a more lively interest in them as neighbours. Indeed a more sane and healthful and sympathetic view of all of Nature follows an introduction to the birds that play so important and delightful a role in the great moving picture constantly unrolling its scroll before our eyes.
Everyone should join the National Association of Audubon Societies not only because there are still some sections of this big country where plucked robins are sold on skewers in the markets, but because there is today no American who, consciously or unconsciously, is not already in the Society's debt.
The book details :
Author: Neltje Blanchan
Publication date: 1925
Company: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, Page, for Nelson Doubleday
My review: An interesting book about birds in the United States with Illustrations