State Reports 271 Club of America, is a member and lectures frequently at the meetings. He and other members spend much time in the woods and fields studying birds and arresting or admonishing their destroyers. Over two hundred bird -traps .have been found and destroyed by the Society during the present year. Much correspondence with bird enthusiasts in outlying towns and districts is handled, and great effort is being made to secure the interest of our con- gressmen amd members of the legislature to assist in the enacting of laws for the better preservation of song and insectivorous birds in America." — G. B. MASON, Secretary. The Burroughs Club of America: Pennsylvania. — "A growing interest is apparent in bird study and bird protection in Pennsylvania, and this is especially so in western Pennsylvania. Many schools are incorporating the study of wild birds and animals in their courses of study: books on these subjects are included in their supplementary reading and libraries. Young people's societies are asking for addresses and lectures on birds, and women's clubs are interesting themselves similarly, the State Federation of Women's Clubs of Pennsylvania having requested a paper from our secretary, Miss Mary H. Gibson, for their annual session. Farmers are taking an interest in native birds and their protection, largely through the efficient and unsel- fish labors of our State Economic Zoologist, Prof. H. A. Surface, whose bulletins on the subject are eagerly sought and whose lectures abound in sympathy. "Farmers in many communities are banding together and establishing bird preserves in which no shooting or hunting is permitted. The superin- tendents and managers of coal-mining concerns are, in numerous instances, taking it upon themselves to see that the laws are not violated by the foreigners in their employ. Thus some of the worst conditions we have had to meet were immediately dissipated. " Schools and manual training classes are, in places, taking up systematic bird-home construction and erection. Bird feeding in winter during the year was widely practiced. The work, as we see ;t, has just begun, how- ever, for it is to be doubted if any state had worse conditions in the matter of flagrant, persistent and unpunished violations of the law. In many com- munities scarcely a bird was allowed to live, boys and foreigners working a most cruel and wanton destruction. Since active labor toward strict law enforcement was undertaken, some of these regions report a marked increase in bird life. Conditions are still bad in many places, sufficient volunteers for law enforcement not yet having appeared. Almost every conceivable viola- tion of law is still practiced in remote districts." — C. Leon BRUMBAUGH, President.
