II 



plojed to shoot birds during migrations and in the 



early sumiuer, cleared over |!;^,500 iu less tliau cue year 

 by the sale of mounted birds for hats and bonnets. His 

 expenditures, he said, were about $1,500 in the ten 

 months he was actively engaged in the business. He 

 sold the birds at prices ranging from one dollar and 

 fifty cents per dozen, for small-sized, dull-plumaged 

 birds, (song sparrows, hair-birds, juncos, English spar- 

 rows, oven birds, etc.), to five, six, eight and ten dollars 

 per dozen, for male scarlet tanagers, red-winged black- 

 birds, bobolinks, rose-breasted grosbeaks, indigo birds 

 and bright-plumaged warblers such as the Black- 

 burnian, Kentucky, Yellow and Magnolia. This same 

 individual also, some years before, or when the craze 

 of decorating woman's headgear with birds first began, 

 in one season obtained from the coast of New Jersey 

 1.100 terns, chiefly the Lesser Tern {Sterna antillarum) 

 and gulls, for which he gave the gunners fifteen and 

 twenty-five cents apiece, and then stuffed and sold 

 them for hats at twelve and fifteen dollars per dozen. 



During the four years which this man engaged in 

 supplying birds to milliners he collected, mostly in 

 Pennsylvania and New Jersey, at least 20,000 skins. 



■\V'hy produce here these statistics of the hat-bird 

 taxidermist? 



They are given simply to call attention of the 

 farmers of Pennsylvania, for whose especial benefit the 

 legislators directed this report should be prepared, to 

 one of the chief causes which has been in active opera- 

 tion for the past ten or fifteen years to destroy birds, 

 many of which rank among the first of all natural 

 agencies which the Wise Creator has placed in our 

 midst to keep in check ravenous insect hosts, that, if 

 unchecked, would soon lay our crops to waste. 



