Our busy season is in the spring of the year. At about Easter time our State Superintendent of Schools issued his 'Arbor and Bird-Day Annual,' which contained an invitation to teachers and children to join the Audubon Society. This invitation brought an almost overwhelming response, every day for several weeks bringing me ten or fifteen letters from would-be branches, and our school membership mounted rapidly to over 10,000. A prize offered to these children for the best personal observation on a Bird Family was won by a little country girl, who wrote a very good composition on the Ground Sparrow. We have tried, with varying degrees of success, in different places, to institute the work of the 'Bird Restorers' among these children.
We shall soon have a little library of bird books circulating among the schools, and we are trying to raise money for a set of lantern slides to accompany a lecture--lecture and slides to be sent from place to place.
I believe that the Audubon work has already made a deep impression in Wisconsin. The milliners' windows abound in Gulls and Birds of Paradise, but they are not finding a ready sale. As to wings, perhaps it is too much to expect that women will not believe their milliners when told that "These wings are all right, because they are made."
The surprising results which may follow Fashion's demand for a certain kind of bird have never been more clearly shown than in the case of the Terns or Sea Swallows of our Atlantic coasts.
Useless for food, the birds had escaped the demands of the hunter, and thousands nested in security along our beaches. The exquisite purity of their plumage and their unsurpassed gracefulness on the wing made them a particularly grateful element of the coast scenery to every lover of the beautiful, while to the prosaic fisherman they often gave welcome evidence of the direction of the land, as with unerring flight they returned through the densest fogs, bearing food to their young.
Suddenly, as a result of causes too mysterious for the mind of man to comprehend, Fashion claimed the Terns for her own.
Up and down the coast word went forth, that Sea Swallows, or 'Summer Gulls,' were worth ten cents each, and the milliner's agent was there to confirm the report.