THE AMERICAxN EGRET IN A SOUTHERN CAROLINA 

 CYPRESS FOREST 



ANYONF] who knows how abundant the Snowy "Herons" or 

 Ei^rets were in our southern States twenty-five years ago, will 

 (louhtless be surprised to learn that no little difficulty was 

 experienced in finding a locality where the necessary studies could 

 be made for an Egret group. So effectively, indeed, have the plume- 

 hunters done their work that it was feared that this beautiful and fast- 

 vanishing species could not be included among the Ha])itat Groups, 

 when, fjuite by chance, a colony of Egrets was heard of on a shooting 

 preserve in South Carolina. It appears that when the land was accjuired 

 it contained a few Egrets, survivors of a once flourishing colony. The 

 new owners rigidly protected them, and they soon began to increase, 

 forming, at the end of seven years, a rookery which would have done 

 credit to the days of i\u(lubon. 



The nests were in cypresses at an average height of forty feet, and 

 the birds were studied and photographed from a moss-draped blind 

 attached to the limb of a tree forty-five feet above the water. 



Sketches for the background were also made from the trees in order 

 to secure the desired effect of height. 



The plumes or "aigrettes" for which this Heron and its near relatives 

 inhabiting the warmer portions of the world have been slaughtered are 

 worn l)y both sexes. They are ac([uired prior to the nesting season and 

 constitute the birds' wedding costume, to be displayed as the pose of the 

 bird in the group indicates. As the season advances and they become 

 frayed and dirty, they are shed. 



Aigrettes are to be secured, therefore, only during the period of 

 reproduction, and this fact, added to the Heron's communal habits, 

 accounts for the surprising rapidity with which the birds have been 

 brought to the verffe of extinction. Concealed in the rookerv, it is a 

 simple thing to shoot the parents as they return with food for their young; 

 and in the early days of "phmiing," it was not unusual for a man to kill 

 several hundred birds at a sitting. It will be observed that the plumes 

 grow only from })etween the shoulders, wliere a circular cut of the knife 

 "scalps" the bird by removing the skin to which the forty or fifty 

 aiffrettes are attached. 



