Protection of North American Birds. 159 



localities, all the larger song-birds. This is particularly the 

 case in portions of the south, where strings of small birds 

 may be seen suspended in the game-stalls. In March of last 

 year, a well-known ornithologist reports finding in the market 

 at Norfolk, Ya., hundreds of wood-peckers and song-birds 

 exposed for sale as food, the list of species including not only 

 robins, meadow-larks, and blackbirds, but many kinds of 

 sparrows and thrushes, and even warblers, vireos, and wax- 

 wings. While some of the stalls had each from three hundred 

 to four hundred small birds, others would have but a dozen 

 or two. ' Nearly ail the vendors were colored people, and 

 doubtless most of the birds were captured by the same class.' 

 This ' daily exhibition in southern markets ' indicates an 

 immense destruction of northern-breeding song-birds which 

 resort to the southern states for a winter home," and we in 

 Canada must not overlook the fact that many of our birds 

 migrate to these districts, to escape our severe winter, never 

 to return, and hence this is a subject for serious consideration 

 by us. 



The eggs of many species of terns, gulls, plovers, and 

 other marsh and shore breeding species, are systematically 

 taken for use as food, the egg-hunting busines being prose- 

 cuted to such an extent as to prove a serious cause of decrease 

 of the species thus persecuted, while the value as food of the 

 eggs thus destroyed, is too trivial to be for an instant regard- 

 ed as of serious importance. 



Mr Sennett writes a paper in which he refers to the des- 

 truction of young birds rather than to eggs, and makes a 

 statement which he says, for fiendish enterprise, exceeds 

 anything that has ever come under his notice. In lS^Y, and 

 also in 1878, while studying the birds about Corpus Christi 

 Bay, Texas, he examined a low grass-flat called Pelican 

 Island, so named on account of the numbers of brown peli- 

 cans that had for years taken it for their breeding-place, to 

 the exclusion of all other species. Here many thousands of 

 these great birds were tending their eggs and young, breed- 

 ing in such numbers that one could step or jump from nest 

 to nest, over nearly, if not quite, every square yard of the 

 island. Four years later he cruised over the same course, 



