Now, if we start with a single pair, and these are allowed to live and breed, unmolested, till they die at the end of ten years,--as they might do if turned loose into a good-sized island with ample vegetable and insect food, but no other competing or destructive birds or quadrupeds--their numbers would amount to more than twenty millions.

But we know very well that our bird population is no greater, on the average, now than it was ten years ago.

Year by year it may fluctuate a little according as the winters are more or less severe, or from other causes, but on the whole there is no increase.

What, then, becomes of the enormous surplus population annually produced?
It is evident they must all die or be killed, somehow; and as the increase is, on the average, about five to one, it follows that, if the average number of birds of all kinds in our islands is taken at ten millions--and this is probably far under the mark--then about fifty millions of birds, including eggs as possible birds, must annually die or be destroyed.

Yet we see nothing, or almost nothing, of this tremendous slaughter of the innocents going on all around us.