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 masse.  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.

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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 masses of waterfowl, grouse, pheasants, deer and fish, usually supported in true heraldic fashion by the men who slew them and the implements of slaughter.  The world has become somewhat hardened to these things, because the victims are classed 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 passerine 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 passage 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

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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 attitude 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.