WOMEN NOT CONSERVATIONISTS 261 
Umbagog. One bird is standing erect over its two large eggs in a nest of 
leaves on the ground; the other just coming up from the water is half hidden 
by a ridge of moss. That it is June is proclaimed in the foreground of the 
group by a clump of blossoming viburnum, by tall purple rhodora and on 
the ground waxen flowers of bunchberry. Rocks at the edge of the lake 
make gradual the transition to the painted background where the artist, 
Mr. Hobart Nichols, has portrayed a portion of the lake, its irregular 
evergreen-covered projections of land and its still reaches of water leading 
to a farther shore and mountains in the distance. 
This group is the last in the series of habitat bird groups installed under 
the supervision of Mr. Frank M. Chapman, the habitat being the work of 
Mr. J. D. Figgins and Mr. A. E. Butler. That the loon group has been 
made possible is due to the generosity of the benefactors to whom the 
Museum is indebted for the whole series. 
WOMEN NOT CONSERVATIONISTS 
From an Address by Frank M. Chapman 
NSECTS cost a loss to our forests of $100,000,000 a year. The Biologi- 
cal Survey of the United States has shown that the stomach of a 
single cedar bird contained 100 canker worms, that of a cuckoo 250 
tent caterpillars, of a chickadee 454 plant lice, of a flicker 1,000 chinch 
bugs, and of a scarlet tanager 630 gypsy moth caterpillars. A tanager 
eats moth caterpillars at the rate of 2,100 an hour. A Maryland yellow- 
throat ate 3,500 plant lice in forty minutes. 
Yet chief among the enemies of the birds and therefore of the forests is 
woman. In shopping districts where I have made ornithological studies 
on women’s hats, I found woodpeckers, flycatchers, orioles, bobolinks, 
meadow larks, tree and white-throated sparrows, snow buntings, waxwings, 
swallows, tanagers, warblers, thrashers, robins and bluebirds by scores and 
hundreds. The destructive power of fashion is shown in the case of the 
ptarmigan grouse. In winter it is snowy white and its plumage may be 
dyed any color. The flesh of the birds is good food, but the food demand 
did not drain the supply. When the feathers became fashionable, however, 
2,000,000 were killed in four years; one shipment contained ten tons of 
wings. Twenty thousand paradise birds are shipped annually. Of the 
thousands of herons which glorified our marshes only a few remain since 
the egret plumes became the fashion. In one year Venezuela exported 
1,538,000 plumes of herons, and these figures do not take into account 
possibly double that number of young herons which starved in their nests 
for lack of care. 
