Men and Birds.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17936, 3 December 1923, Page 8

Men and Birds.

It is encouraging that the New Zealand Native Birds Protection Society is making progress in spita of a very slender purse. Three months ago the Society was preparing to sow the seed of its teaching where it is likely to do most good—hi the minds and hearts of the young —and we gather from a further communication from the secretary that this is now being done. So long as the Society avoids the blunder of provoking a clash between Sentiment and self-interest its success is assured. There are native birds, as there are imported ones, that have become a pest, and it is neither wise nor necessary to seek to develop a Bentiment for creatures whose interests are not mankind's. The tiger, for example, is a most beautiful animal, and the rhinooeros interesting if not beautiful, but it could hardly be contended that the protection of such "earth-born companions" is a duty in or near a civilised settlement. Fortunately, tfca numbed of purely destructive New Zealand birds is not large, while the economic reasons for preserving the others are quite as strong as the sentimental. The tui, for example, is an admitted theif of fruit and honey, and the delightful bell-bird another; but clcso observers tell us that both do an increasingly important work in. pollinating utility trees like the eucalypts. Whoever watches birds closely enough discovers in general that their good deeds far outweigh the bad. bo that it is a careless eye quite as much as a Blow-footed imagination which gives most of us our chief difficulty in accepting the generalisations of enthusiasts who say "No birds, no "forests, and without forests no men.'' The Society rightly points out that the destruction of the weka, for example, means the removal of the chief enemy of the native rat, and sinoe the rat is the deadly enemy of the smaller treebreeding birds, to kill wekas is to kill fantails and warblers, and eo to 6pare myriads of destructive insects, and hit every cultivator a distinct blow on hia pocket. It is not possiSe to agree

with everything that men of science tell ins, but an increasing number of farmers of all kinds are beginning to understand what entomologists mean when they say thai th© war between men and insects is a war to th© death; that it never can and never will be suspended ; and that man will rule the earth only so long as he realises it. Our greatest ally in every country is the bird —and almost every kind of bird.