Note 77 — Chapter II

Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane, p. 143. The country about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers who watch from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down in to the nets by throwing stones over them. See Appendix, No. 14.

Tschudi has collected in his little work, Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der Vögel, many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, and the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the burrows of the mole are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square miles under water.—Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, 1re sémestre, p. 150. See also Vogt, Nützliche u. schädliche Thiere.