1910 J BowDiSH, Bird Photogra'phing in the Carolinas. 311 



On the docks at Moorehead City on June 29 we met and talked 

 with A. T. Finer, who was one of the most active plumers in former 

 times, and pHed his trade along the Atlantic coast from Maine to 

 Florida, killing all species of terns, the American Egret and Snowy 

 Heron. The price he had received for terns' wings was one and 

 one half cents a pair, and at this he had made good wages! He 

 thought that he had himself killed twenty thousand birds, besides 

 those killed by his assistants. He and one assistant would each 

 skin one hundred Least Terns in twenty-four hours. When they 

 found a colony of the lovely little Least Terns they were able to 

 kill every adult bird, because the parental instinct brought the last 

 one back to its nesting site. And then came the closing chapter 

 in his gruesome tale. Many young already hatched at the time of 

 the slaughter were left parentless. Many eggs, of course, never 

 hatched, but others that were approaching the completion of 

 incubation hatched in the sun, and the tiny chicks joined the ranks 

 of their older brothers. This man had seen the tiny chicks gathered 

 on the beach so thickly that they looked like drift brought up by the 

 tide, huddled at the water's edge, dipping their little beaks in the 

 salt wavelets in a vain endeavor to assuage the terrible pangs that 

 dead parents could never again provide against. Those who have 

 not visited these semitropical islets, whose flat, sandy surfaces 

 lie just above the level of the lapping waves, can have no conception 

 of what it is to feel the awful pangs of hunger and thirst, Avhere 

 water, sand and air reflect back again and again the all-pervading, 

 burning rays of the sun. What a satisfaction to feel that this 

 unspeakably brutal trade has been almost eliminated, as far as our 

 own coasts are concerned, by the work so earnestly commenced by 

 the Bird Protection Committee of the American Ornithologists' 

 Union, and so ably carried on by the Audubon Societies. 



