The Sportsman's Corner

I do not know if deer season is the appropriate time to write a column about the disappearance of songbirds. However, even an unobservant sportsman like me has noticed that there are far fewer birds around than there once were.

Sadly, this is a problem of major significance. I recently read in "The Gnatcatcher," Juniata Valley Audubon's newsletter, of a study published by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology documenting a loss of about three billion individual birds over the past 48 years in the United States and Canada, which is almost unimaginable.

House sparrows lead the list of missing...