I30 



KNOWLEDGE & SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 



[June, 1904. 



It should be made a punishable offence to sell feathers 

 under the desi,L,'nation of " artificial," for thereby incal- 

 culable harm is done, and women are again and again 

 made parties to a traffic they abhor. True, some do not 

 care ; but many do. To sell feathers of any kind as 

 artificial is to obtain money by fraud. A man can no 

 more be justified for selling as artificial that which is 

 real, than for selling chalk and water as milk. 



To give an idea of the appalling waste of life which the 

 trade in "Ospreys" is responsible for, we may remark 

 that in London alone, last year, the produce of 196,000 

 birds was sold ! As many were probably sold in the 

 markets of Paris and Berlin, since London no longer has 

 the monopoly of the feather trade. 



1 "g- .?•- Portion of a quill leather of a Rhea, i rorti the left side a large 

 piece of the stem has been cut. liy twisting this round, the barbs 

 become i.solated and simulate, crudely, the "osprev" plume. Such 

 plumes are sold in the shops as "imitation ospreys," or as 

 "vultures'" feathers. 



Unfortunately for the Egrets, these feathers are worn only 

 during the breeding season, and by both se.xes. As a conse- 

 (]uencethe slaughter of the adult birds at this time ensures 

 the death by slow starvation of thousands of young. Really 

 ihe prosecution of such butchery is devilish ; but what 

 shall be said of those who, knowing this, yet purchase 

 these ghastly trophies ? To write temperately on this 

 aspect of the subject is difficult. The accounts published 

 by Mr. W. E. U. Scott, an American ornithologist of 

 the highest standing, are positively sickening. Yet he 

 purposely refrained from making anything but the 

 baldest statements of fact ; so much so, that those who 

 do not know him, as the writer does, might accuse him 

 of callousness. In his investigations, made in 1886, into 

 the condition of some of the Bird Rookeries of the Gulf 

 Coast of Florida, he found that since his last visit, si.x 

 years previously, whole colonies of birds, numbering in 

 their palmy days many thousands of individuals, had 

 been absolutely wiped out by " plume-hunters." These 

 ghouls travelled in bands of sometimes as many as 60 in 



a band. Let me quote two or three passages from his paper 

 asasample. \'isiting thebreedingplaceof thereddish Egret 

 in Charlotte Harbour, he writes : " This had evidently 

 been only a short time before a large rookery. The trees 

 were full of nests, some of which still contained eggs, and 

 hundreds of broken eggs strewed the ground everywhere. 

 . . I found a huge pile of dead, half-decayed birds 

 lying on the ground, which had apparently been killed 

 for a day or two. All of them had the ' plumes ' taken 

 with a patch of skin from the back, and some had the 

 wingscutoff. . . ." Again: ". . . theexlermina- 

 tion of a Brown Pelican Rookery . . . is a very fair 

 example of the atrocities that have been and are still 

 being committed to obtain ' bird plumes.' . . . One 

 afternoon, when Johnson (his informant) was absent 

 from home, hunting, the old Frenchman (A. Lechevallier) 

 came in with a boat and deliberately killed off the old 

 birds as they were feeding their young, obtaining about 

 one hundred and eighty of them. The young, about 

 three weeks old, to the number of several hundred at 

 least, and utterly unable to care for themselves in any 

 way, were simply left to starve to death in their nests, or 

 eaten by raccoons and buzzards." 



One feels sorely tempted to add to this catalogue of 

 crime if only in the hope that it may stir up some com- 

 punction in the minds of those directly concerned. 

 Nowadays, unfortunately, we have become saturated 

 with a spirit of scepticism, which is nowhere more in- 

 jurious than in questions of this kind. " But is it not all 

 horribly exaggerated ? It really can't be true, you know ! " 

 is the cry of some to whom I have related these horrors. 

 Others shrug the shoulders and say : "We really must 

 not be sentimental ; let us set to work, quite dispassion- 

 ately, and collect evidence." And there they leave the 

 matter ! 



Statements have appeared from time to time to the 

 effect that Egret farms, on the lines of Ostrich farms, have 

 been started both in Tunis and in America. The Ameri- 

 can farm was visited some time since, and found to con- 

 sist of half-a-dozen birds in a small cage in a back yard. 

 .\ detailed and glowing description was published in a 

 German paper in 1896 of the success which had attended 

 the establishment in Tunis. But the statement that the 

 birds were fed on the carcases of horses, mules, and 

 donkeys, aroused one's suspicions, and these are con- 

 firmed by the assurance that the birds are deplumed 

 i'u'icc a year. The long plumes, as a matter of fact, are 

 worn only during the breeding season, and therefore the 

 story of the double crop proves too much. After careful 

 enquiry, I cannot find that there is a shadow of truth in 

 any part of the story. But it has caused much mischief, 

 since plumes have been sold as the product of such 

 farms. 



Buyers of these feathers in milliners' shops are often 

 told that the feathers are not plucked from the bird at 

 all, but picked up off the ground. It is probably true 

 that here and there a moulted feather is picked up in fair 

 condition, but these can always be recognised by their 

 soiled state and brittleness. They are useless for decora- 

 tive purposes. Though normally white, these plumes, 

 it should be remarked, are often dyed, but that does not 

 make them " artificial." 



From the illustrations to this paper there can be little 

 difficulty, really, in distmguishing the " Osprey " plume, 

 taken from the Egret, from the imitation " Osprey " made 

 of Rhea feathers, or from the feathers of the Peacock. 

 Undoubtedly, and unfortunately, the Egret plumes are 

 the more graceful. Were this not so, one might hope to 

 persuade those w ho consider feather ornaments of this 

 kind necessary, to adopt the wearing of Rhea feathers, if 



