Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Anne Storer, some images courtesy of The Internet Archive and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: Title page added. * * * * * BIRDS A MONTHLY SERIAL ILLUSTRATED BY COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY DESIGNED TO PROMOTE KNOWLEDGE OF BIRD-LIFE VOLUME II. CHICAGO. NATURE STUDY PUBLISHING COMPANY. COPYRIGHT, 1897 BY NATURE STUDY PUBLISHING CO. CHICAGO. BIRDS. ILLUSTRATED BY COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY ================================ VOL. II. OCTOBER NO. 4 ================================ BIRDS IN CAPTIVITY. It was our intention in this article to give a number of instances of a pathetic nature concerning the sufferings of the various species of birds which it has been, and still is, a habit with many people to keep confined in cages totally inadequate for any other purpose than that of cruelty. The argument that man has no moral right to deprive an innocent creature of liberty will always be met with indifference by the majority of people, and an appeal to their intelligence and humanity will rarely prove effective. To capture singing birds for any purpose is, in many states, prohibited by statute. But the law is violated. Occasionally an example is made of one or more transgressors, but as a rule the officers of the law, whose business it should be to prevent it, manifest no interest whatever in its execution. The bird trappers as well know that it is against the law, but so long as they are unmolested by the police, they will continue the wholesale trapping. A contemporary recently said: "It seems strange that this bird-catching industry should increase so largely simultaneously with the founding of the Illinois Audubon Society. The good that that society has done in checking the habit of wearing birds in bonnets, seems to have been fairly counterbalanced by the increase in the number of songsters captured for cage purposes. These trappers choose the nesting season as most favorable for their work, and every pair of birds they catch means the loss of an entire family in the shape of a set of eggs or a nestful of young left to perish slowly by starvation."