LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN" PETRELS AND PELICANS. 11 



In comparing the conditions, noted by him in 1903 and in 1911, Mr. 

 William Alanson Bryan (1912) says: 



The slaughter wrought by the plume hunters is everywhere apparent. One 

 of the work buildings formerly used by the guano company and later as a 

 storehouse by the poachers is still standing. With a side torn out and left 

 open to the weather by the men of the Thetis, it is still filled with thousands 

 of pairs of albatross wings. Though weatherbeaten and useless, they show 

 how they were cut from the birds whose half-bleached skeletons lie in thousands 

 of heaps scattered all over the island. 



This wholesale killing has had an appalling effect on the colony. No one 

 can estimate the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of birds that 

 have been wilfully sacrificed on Laysan to the whim of fashion and the lust 

 of gain. It is conservative to say that fully one-half the number of birds 

 of both species of albatross that were so abundant everywhere in 1903 have been 

 killed. The colonies that reiuain are in a sadly decimated condition. Often 

 a colony of a dozen or more birds will not have a single young. Over a large 

 part of the island, in some sections a hundred acres in a place, that 10 years 

 ago was thickly inhabited by albatrosses, not a single bird remains, while 

 heaps of the slain lie as mute testimony of the awful slaughter of these 

 beautiful, harmless, and without doubt beneficial inhabitants of the high seas. 



Fortunately, serious as wei-e the depredations of the poachers, their op- 

 erations were interrupted before any of the species had been completely ex- 

 terminated. So far as the birds that secure their food from the sea are con- 

 cerned, it is reasonable to suppose they will increase in number, and that 

 nature will in time restore the island to its former populous condition if no 

 further slaughter is permitted. Owing to the indiscriminate method of the 

 killing, usually only one or the other of mated pairs was sacrificed. The 

 unmated birds that survive are slow in selecting another mate. As but a 

 single egg is laid by the majority of these birds, it will possibly take 10 

 years for the sea birds of the colony to regain their former numerical strength. 



In his report of the same expedition Prof. Homer R. Dill (1912) 

 estimates the number of Laysan albatrosses on the island in 1911 as 

 180,000 and the total bird population as over a million, which gives 

 some encouragement that the principal species nesting on the island 

 are in no danger of extermination. 



A similar tale of destruction is told by Mr. Bryan (1903) in his 

 account of the Marcus Island colony of Laysan albatrosses which 

 were killed and boiled down to make fertilizer, which was shipped 

 to Japan ; the long wing quills were saved and sold, as eagle feathers, 

 to the millinery trade. 



Spring. — The Laysan albatrosses begin to arrive on their breeding 

 grounds during the last week in October and in November the nesting 

 season is well under way. Doctor Fisher (1904) says: 



The albatrosses live on Laysan nearly ten months of the year. During the 

 last days of October, before the winter storms set in, the first vanguard of 

 the mighty army appears, and for days they continue to flock in from all 

 points of the compass. Dr. H. Schauinsland, who witnessed their advent, 

 says that in exposed places the island becomes literally white with the count- 

 less throng, as if great snowflakes had suddenly descended upon the scene. 



