BULLETIN No. 36 63 



In my immediate surrounding the baleful influence of the 

 plume hunter has not been felt, and it never has been my ill 

 fortune to meet one of those much abused and much written 

 about gentlemen. 



There is no doubt that surf and shore birds have suffered 

 greatly from the depredations of the plume hunter; the Gulls 

 and the Terns adding largely to the victims of his deadly gun. 

 But in inland districts, remote from water courses and the sea, 

 where the birds are seldom taken for the millinery trade, their 

 unmistakable decrease in numbers must be attributed to some- 

 thing else. 



hi eighteen hundred and forty-eight my father moved 

 from Key West, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia. The place was 

 then a little country town, and the spot upon which our home was 

 b jilt, was virtually in the wilderness. The Bob White, or Part- 

 ridge, as it was commonly called, was a familiar bird, and plenti- 

 fully found anywhere in the woods. They were not often dis- 

 turbed, for the sturdy old farmer in those days would have con- 

 sidered it defamation of character to point his long squirrel rifle 

 at such small game as a Partridge. 



Soon Atlanta outgrew her swaddling clothes, and the far 

 Teaching hand of progressive man began to remodel the plan of 

 the little village and in time her barren fields and red clay hills 

 were hidden by tlie towering walls of a great city. The modern 

 breech loader, and the well trained dog appeared upon the scene 

 and the Bob White like the wandering Arab folded his tent and 

 stole silently away. 



in this Southern country before the civil war, when land 

 and labor were both plentiful and cheap, it was a common cus- 

 tom with the farmer in prepairing his "new ground" to girdle 

 the trees and leave them standing upon the land. 



The fields after being cultivated or "skinned" for four or 

 five years, were "turned out" to become a tangle of weeds or 

 briars. These old fields were always a kind of preempted 

 claim of the Bob White, while the dead trees above them were 

 perforated with the holes of the Red-headed Woodpecker, and 

 Flicker, the Bluebird coming in as a social adjunct to the rest 

 of the family. 



