The American reader must be reminded that the Italian peninsula reaches
out a long arm of land into the Mediterranean Sea for several hundred
miles toward the sunny Barbary coast of North Africa. This great
southward highway has been chosen by the birds of central Europe as
their favorite migration route. Especially is this true of the small
song-birds with weak wings and a minimum of power for long-sustained
flight. Naturally, they follow the peninsula down to the Italian Land's
End before they launch forth to dare the passage of the Mediterranean.

[Illustration: AN ITALIAN ROCCOLO, ON LAKE COMO
A Death-Trap for Song-Birds. From the Avicultural Magazine]

Italy is the narrow end of a great continental funnel, into the wide
northern end of which Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland annually
pour their volume of migratory bird life. And what is the result? For
answer let us take the testimony of two reliable witnesses, and file it
for use on the day when Tony Macchewin, gun in hand and pockets bulging
with cartridges, goes afield in our country and opens fire on our birds.

The linnet is one of the sweet singers of Europe. It is a small,
delicately formed, weak-winged little bird, about the size of our
phoebe-bird. It weighs only a trifle more than a girl's love-letter.
Where it breeds and rears its young, in Germany for example, a true
sportsman would no more think of shooting a linnet than he would of
killing and eating his daughter's dearest canary.

To the migrating bird, the approach to northern Italy, either going or
returning, is not through a land of plenty. The sheltering forests have
mostly been swept away, and safe shelters for small birds are very rare.
In the open, there are owls and hawks; and the only refuge from either