235 The long flight back 



exactly 18 American egrets, of which seven pairs had built nests. 



The egret had been reduced to this state from numbers that 

 must once have been tremendously impressive. During the long 

 campaign to obtain protection for their colonies, Gilbert Pearson 

 described this former abundance: "At one time the lake shores 

 of Florida teemed with tens of thousands of these elegant, long- 

 legged white creatures. Several years ago I visited rookeries con- 

 taining great numbers of them, but even then the work of destruc- 

 tion was going on. While visiting a plume hunter's camp in 1886 

 I was told that the New York feather dealers paid ninety cents 

 for the plumes of every bird. Since that time the price has gone 

 up and up until recently tourists at Miami and Palm Beach have 

 been paying $10 and more for the scalp of each bird brought in 

 by the white hunters and Seminole Indians of the Everglades 

 country. For several years past the National Association of Audu- 

 bon Societies has been employing guards to protect the few re- 

 maining colonies as far as they are known. These nesting places 

 are distributed from the coastal region of North Carolina south- 

 ward to the Florida Keys, but it is debatable whether the species 

 can be saved, although without the efforts of the Audubon Society 

 the bird would probably have disappeared entirely by this time." 



Of course, as has been pointed out elsewhere, what the egret 

 faced was being completely wiped out in the United States, not 

 total extinction as a species. But the extirpation of a large local 

 population can be the forerunner of the destruction of local popu- 

 lations elsewhere, with final extinction as the eventual result. This 

 was especially true in the case of the egret, whose destruction had 

 a commercial basis. As the Florida colonies were ravaged and de- 

 pleted, plume hunters and dealers began transferring their opera- 

 tions to untouched fields in South America, and who can tell what 

 the ultimate fate of the egrets there might have been if the 

 plumage trade itself had not been outlawed in the United States 

 a few years later? Now, fifty-three years after Bent's report from 

 Cuthbert Lake and at the cost of the lives of three Audubon 

 wardens plus other, less valuable, considerations the American 

 egret is an abundant bird once more, nesting throughout Florida, 

 along the Gulf Coast to Texas, and northward to Oregon, Min- 



