Your Bird Friends and How to Win Them Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Your Bird Friends and How to Win Them

I Love Birds - that is the reason for this little book, and everything here set down is explained by that - I love the birds. Birds have made my life happier, and I want to exert the same inspiring influence on others as they have on me. Make friends with our native birds - that is my message. The birds richly repay you for the trouble you take in attracting them and looking out for their interests.

In this booklet I am going to tell you how to attract and win birds so that the same families will return to you every year. I have done this at my former home in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, at my farm in Michigan, at my winter home on the Isle of Pines, and at my beautiful home, Bird Lodge, here at Kankakee, which is just fifty miles south of Chicago, on the banks of the Kankakee River.

Many who have only a little patch of city garden have induced song birds to live with them by putting up Dodson Bird Houses. This is a greater achievement than helping the rich men who have many acres. The blessed little birds make no distinction between rich and poor.

No Place Too Small

The illustration above shows how many bird houses can be put in a small space, and yet be occupied by many varieties of birds. In the fifty feet square, shown in this illustration, there lived in peaceful contentment families of the Wren, Bluebird, Great Crested Ply Catcher, Tree Swallow, Oriole, and a large colony of Purple Martins.

The building of bird nouses has been a hobby of mine for many years, and never has been run solely for profit. I think you will agree with me that in the end, it is a great work for good. My own work is in financial affairs and yet there is no success in my life that I value higher than my success as an architect for birds.

I tell you this because I want you, as you read my talks about bird houses, to realize that my first interest is always for the birds and bird-loving…