From reports that have come to me at first hand regarding Italians in the East, Hungarians in Pennsylvania and Austrians in Minnesota, it seems absolutely certain that all members of the lower classes of southern Europe are a dangerous menace to our wild life.

On account of the now-accursed land-of-liberty idea, every foreigner who sails past the statue on Bedloe’s Island and lands on our liberty-ridden shore, is firmly convinced that now, at last, he can do as he pleases!  And as one of his first ways in which to show his newly-acquired personal liberty and independence in the Land of Easy Marks, he buys a gun and goes out to shoot “free game!”

If we, as a people, are so indolent and so somnolent that Antonio gets away with all our wild birds, then do we deserve to be robbed.

Italians are pouring into America in a steady stream.  They are strong, prolific, persistent and of tireless energy.  New York City now contains 340,000 of them.  They work while the native Americans sleep.  Wherever they settle, their tendency is to root out the native American and take his place and his income.  Toward wild life the Italian laborer is a human mongoose.  Give him power to act, and he will quickly exterminate every wild thing that wears feathers or hair.  To our songbirds he is literally a “pestilence that walketh at noonday”.

As we have shown, the Italian is a born pot-hunter, and he has grown up in the fixed belief that killing song-birds for food is right!  To him all is game that goes into the bag.  The moment he sets foot in the open, he provides himself with a shot-gun, and he looks about for things to kill.  It is “a free country;” therefore, he may kill anything he can find, cook it and eat it.  If anybody attempts to check him,—­sapristi! beware his gun!  He cheerfully invades your fields, and even your lawn; and he shoots robins, bluebirds, thrushes, catbirds, grosbeaks, tanagers, orioles, woodpeckers, quail, snipe, ducks, crows, and herons.

Down in Virginia, near Charlottesville, an Italian who was working on a new railroad once killed a turkey buzzard; and he selfishly cooked it and ate it, all alone.  A pot-hunting compatriot of his heard of it, and reproached him for having-dined on game in camera.  In the quarrel that ensued, one of the “sportsmen” stabbed the other to death.

When the New York Zoological Society began work on its Park in 1899, the northern half of the Borough of the Bronx was a regular daily hunting-ground for the slaughter of song-birds, and all other birds that could be found.  Every Sunday it was “bangetty!” “bang!” from Pelham Bay to Van Cortlandt.  The police force paid not the slightest attention to these open, flagrant, shameless violations of the city ordinances and the state bird laws.  In those days I never but once heard of a policeman on his own initiative arresting a birdshooter, even on Sunday; but whenever meddlesome special wardens from the Zoological Park have pointedly called upon the local police force for help, it has always been given with cheerful alacrity.  In the fall of 1912 an appeal to the Police Commissioner resulted in a general order to stop all hunting and shooting in the Borough of the Bronx, and a reform is now on.