Bird Notes and News 



69 



with attendant hardships. Women of the 

 best families of South CaroHna make it a 

 point of honour not to Mear any feathers 

 other than those of the ostrich and of 

 domestic poultry. I have not seen an Egret 

 plume on a Charleston woman's head in six 

 or seven years. 



" It would strengthen our hands in this 

 great hard fight if English women would 

 uniformly set their faces against such a 

 practice. I have long hoped to be able to 

 bring to the people of England the facts 

 fresh from the field, and to tell them what is 

 going on. 



" Statements emanating from millinery 

 houses are always unreliable." 



To this need only be added the fact 

 that at the December (1912) feather sale 

 in London there were offered more than 



12,400 ounces of " osprey " (Heron and 

 Egret) feathers, in addition to 525 skins. 

 The breeding plumes of six birds are 

 needed to provide one ounce (the trade 

 admit the truth of this estimate, so that 

 it is certainly not an over-estimate) ; 

 therefore the quantity on sale repre- 

 sented 75,000 Herons and Egrets, and to 

 this total must be added the young birds 

 left to die of starvation. Thus, by the 

 wanton destruction of the farmers' allies 

 in North America, and in South America 

 where the great grain-producing country 

 of the future should He, is one useless 

 trade permitted to devastate the harvest- 

 fields, present and future, of the world. 



CC 



Our Vanishing Wild Life." 



It is difiicult to over-estimate the value of 

 such a work as that which has been written 

 by Dr. W. T. Hornaday, Director of the New 

 York Zoological Park, and pubhshed in New 

 York ; and it is to be hoped that an EngHsh 

 pubhsher may speedily be allowed to place 

 " Our Vanishing Wild Life " before the 

 British pubHc. Dr. Hornaday deals, it is 

 true, with the condition of things in the 

 United States first and foremost ; but in 

 more than one matter Britain also is im- 

 phcated deeply, and the lesson of the book 

 is one needed by our own Colonies of Canada 

 and Australia and Africa as much as by the 

 States of Northern America, by the Old 

 World as weU as by the New World. It is a 

 lesson to be taken to heart by every thinking 

 man and woman, and to be enforced by 

 stringent laws and penalties on all who will 

 not think. The wasteful colonist, the heed- 

 less sportsman, the crafty trader, with the 

 collector stalking on the trail of death left 

 by all three : these are daily and everywhere 



impoverishing the world ; and self-interest 

 and stupidity blink contentedly at the 

 brigandage. 



Dr. Hornaday has marshalled for review 

 a striking array of facts ; and he does not 

 mince matters. The destruction of Bird-life 

 occupies a prominent place as perhaps the 

 most shocking part in the whole discreditable 

 story. The researches of Mr. C. W. Beebe 

 bring to fight details of the plume-trade 

 which might well rouse even Government 

 departments to prompt action ; and evidence 

 is presented which should destroy for ever 

 even the hydra-heads of the lie that the 

 " osprey " plumes of commerce are or can 

 be supplied by moulted feathers or egret 

 " farms." Every word spoken by Lord 

 Curzon and Sir Harry Johnston at the Annual 

 Meeting of the R.S.P.B. is weU substantiated 

 by Dr. Hornaday's book. Other phases of 

 the question have no less vigorous treatment. 

 That they too have their moral for English 

 readers is clear to all who have read Mr. W. H. 



