56 



1 rookeries ' of Herons, where we were now anchored, but 

 broken up by plume-hunters, and it was impossible to find 

 any breeding or roosting in this vicinity." 



" 29th May. Saratosa All birds killed off by plume- 

 hunters." 



"It is scarcely necessary to draw any conclusions or 

 inferences. This great and growing evil speaks for itself. 

 I have the names and addresses of some fifty dealers in 

 various towns in Florida and the principal cities of the 

 country. Merchants in New York and other centres are 

 buying every month the skins and plumes of Florida birds, 

 he price paid for such material, notwithstanding the efforts 

 made to create sympathy for the birds, and a feeling against 

 u sing the feathers for hats and other decorative purposes, is 

 ach year becoming higher, showing how great is the demand 

 and how profitable the traffic to these men-milliners." 



From a paper read by Mr. Gilbert Pearson, member of the 

 American Ornithologists' Union, at the World's Congress on 

 Ornithology, at Chicago, in 1897 : 



" I visited a large colony of Herons on Horse Hummock 

 (Central Florida), on April 27th, 1888. Several hundred 

 pairs were nesting there at the time. . . . Three years 

 later I again visited the heronry, but the scene had changed. 

 Not a Heron was visible. The call had come from northern 

 cities for greater quantities of Heron plumes for millinery. 

 The plume-hunter had discovered the colony, and a few 

 shattered nests were all that was left to tell of the once 

 populous colony. The few surviving tenants, if there were 

 any, had fled in terror to the recesses of wilder swamps. 

 A few miles north of Waldo, in the flat pine region, our 

 party came one day upon a little swamp where we had been 

 told Herons bred in numbers. Upon approaching the place 

 the screams of young birds reached our ears. The cause of 

 this soon became apparent by the buzzing of green-flies 

 and the heaps of dead Herons festering in the sun, with the 

 back of each bird raw and bleeding. . . Young Herons 

 had been left by scores in the nests to perish from exposure 

 and starvation." 



