hould 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."

This is the way the trappers proceed. They are nearly all Germans. Bird
snaring is a favorite occupation in Germany and the fondness for the
cruel work was not left behind by the emigrants. More's the pity. These
fellows fairly swarm with their bird limes and traps among the suburbs,
having an eye only to the birds of brightest plumage and sweetest song.
"They use one of the innocents as a bait to lure the others to a
prison." "Two of the trappers," says one who watched them, "took their
station at the edge of an open field, skirted by a growth of willows.
Each had two cage traps. The device was divided into two parts by wires
running horizontally and parallel to the plane of the floor. In the
lower half of each cage was a male American Goldfinch. In the roof of
the traps were two little hinged doors, which turned backward and
upward, leaving an opening. Inside the upper compartment of the trap,
and accessible through the doorway in the roof, was a swinging perch.
The traps were placed on stumps among the growth of thistles and dock
weed, while the trappers hid behind the trees. The Goldfinches confined
in the lower sections of the traps had been the victims of the trappers
earlier in the season, and the sight of their familiar haunts, the
sunlight, the breeze, and the swaying willow branches, where so often
they had perched and sung, caused them to flutter about and to utter
pathetically the call note of their days of freedom. It is upon this
yearning for liberty and its manifestation that the bird trappers depend
to secure more victims. No sooner does the piping call go forth from the
golden throats of the little prisoners, than a reply comes from the
thistle tops, far down the field. A moment more and the traps are
surrounded with the black and yellow beauties. The fact that one of
their own kind is within the curious little house which confronts them
seems to send all their timidity to the winds an