630 THE BLACK-CROWNED NIGHT HERON. 
of year, as a bride is granted her best robes for the wedding day and the 
honeymoon; and if the butchers, whom the feather-merchants hire, were 
to wait until the young birds were raised, the wedding garments of the 
parents would either be worn threadbare in service, or else cast aside. 
Therefore, since it must be done, as our gentle ladies have decreed, the 
only way is to visit a colony during the breeding season, shoot all the old 
birds (who will not of course desert their young), snatch out their nuptial 
plumes, and leave their carcasses to putrify, while the starving children call 
down from the tree-tops to the ears that hear not. Thus a single plume- 
hunter has killed hundreds of Egrets in a_day, and in the palmy days of 
the “industry,” certain gangs were able to kill tens of thousands in a single 
season. 
Of course this slaughter is prohibited by law in the United States, 
but the mischief is nearly all accomplished so far as our own Egrets are 
concerned. Besides that, the inducements held out to the plume-hunters 
by the criminal dealers are very large. It is estimated that a villain named 
Cuthbert cleaned up thirty-five hundred dollars as the result of three days’ 
successful law-breaking in a Florida swamp. And this sort of thing will 
continue just as long as thoughtless or spiritless women will submit to being 
imposed upon by unscrupulous dealers, in the name of a false and man-made 
god, called Fashion. 
If this were a dead issue we could let the Egret go; but there is no 
appeasing this lustful god, whose belly is a Jew’s purse. South America, 
Africa, the islands of the sea, are being ransacked and ravished by the 
emissaries of the feather-merchants. The Egrets are done for; but now, 
forsooth, “paradise aigrettes’’ are demanded, and that these may be sup- 
plied, out-of-the-way places, which civilization will one day require for the 
highest uses, are being desolated for all time. It is not merely that incal- 
culable suffering is being caused to innocent life, but that we are spending 
the birth-right of our own and our children’s future, which makes this 
slaughter for millinery purposes an economic crime. 
No. 251. 
BLACK-CROWNED NIGHT HERON. 
A. O. U. No. 202. Nycticorax nycticorax nevius ( Bodd.). 
Synonyms.—Qua-nirp. Quawk. Nicut SQUAWK. 
Description.— Adult in breeding plumage: Extreme forehead and line over 
eye white; entire underparts white—pure on chin and throat, elsewhere delicately 
tinged with light ashy gray or lilaceous; crown, nape, and scapular-mantle (in- 
