63 On the migration battlefront 



on the hunting of these birds, both for sport and for museum col- 

 lections, all of them highly enthusiastic. 



The museum ornithologists suddenly woke up to the fact that 

 their collections were devoid of specimens of Grus americana. 

 Spencer Fullerton Baird pointed out in 1858 that there were none 

 at that time in the public museums of the United States. In the 

 five or six decades that followed, this deficiency was corrected, but 

 even so, in all the museums of the world, there are today less 

 than 200 skins and skeletons. A greater number were doubtless 

 either shot by meat hunters or killed indirectly, by settlers who 

 broke up the nesting activities of potential parent cranes. 



During the 1880s and 1890s there was a great rage for egg 

 collecting, most of it with a scientific purpose, and the eggs of 

 the whooping crane were among those sought after. They couldn't 

 have been scarce, for an 1880 price list quoted them, in sets of 

 two, at fifty cents each, and by 1890 this price had only gone up to 

 two dollars. In North Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa, where they 

 were still breeding during the eighties, any nest that was found by 

 an interested party was certain to be robbed. Yet egg collectors 

 quite naturally rose up in wrath if anyone suggested that the prac- 

 tice of their scientific hobby contributed to the decimation of the 

 species. In a way, they were right. They merely hastened an end 

 that was foreshadowed by the draining of the first Iowa marsh 

 and the turning of the first furrow in each of those fertile regions. 

 Yet it is amusing to read, in an 1896 issue of the Oologist, that 

 the growing scarcity of many bird species was not considered a 

 result of "egging," but of a combination of "hostile influences." 

 The same writer goes on to say that in North Dakota within a 

 comparatively few years it had grown difficult to find nests of the 

 Canada goose, sandhill crane, whooping crane, trumpeter swan, 

 etc. And he concludes with the elegant statement that "a high 

 state of civilization and opulence of wild life are plainly antago- 

 nistic." 



In the 1920s and the early 1930s, there was an astonishing state 

 of confusion as to the abundance of the whooping crane, which 

 could occur only in this amazing country of ours and in more or 

 less recent years. Where else, except perhaps in England, would 



