On the Continent, and especially in Italy, the comparative scarcity and dearness of animal food combine with the feeling I have just mentioned to stimulate still further the destructive passions of the fowler. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto, containing less than 2,000 square miles, nearly 300,000 thrushes and other small birds are annually brought to market.[77] Birds are less hardy in constitution, they possess less facility of accommodation,[78] and they are more severely affected by climatic excess than quadrupeds. Besides, they generally want the means of shelter against the inclemency of the weather and against pursuit by their enemies, which holes and dens afford to burrowing animals and to some larger beasts of prey. The egg is exposed to many dangers before hatching, and the young bird is especially tender, defenceless, and helpless. Every cold rain, every violent wind, every hailstorm during the breeding season, destroys hundreds of nestlings, and the parent often perishes with her progeny while brooding over it in the vain effort to protect it.[79] The great proportional numbers of birds, their migratory habits, and the ease with which they may escape most dangers that beset them, would seem to secure them from extirpation, and even from very great numerical reduction. But experience shows that when not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, they yield very readily to the hostile influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man.[80]