166 THE IMPORTANCE OF BIRD LIFE 



Egypt 21,047 89,486 



Java, Sumatra, and 



Borneo 15,703 „ 186,504 



Cape of Good Hope 



(chiefly ostrich) 709,406 9,747,146 



British India 18,359 22,137 



Hong-Kong 310 3,090 



British West Indies .... 30 97 



Other British Colonies . . 10,438 21,938 



Total 793,436 $10,288,493 



The means by which the hunters secured their 

 victims were in most cases inhuman and revolt- 

 ingly cruel. Picture, for instance, a small sandy 

 islet scattered over with thousands of nesting 

 gulls. Every few feet there is a small depression 

 in the sand in which lie two heavily marked eggs 

 or a pair of nestlings, little speckled puffs of down. 

 The feather hunter arrives. Pleased that the 

 gulls are nesting and therefore will be easy to 

 kill, he goes to work. Two weeks later there is not 

 a living thing in sight. The young are dead, — 

 starved, — ^the eggs are addled, and the islet is a 

 desert of bones. 



For proof that such a picture is not a figment of 

 imagination, we can take the tragedy of Laysan 

 Island, which occurred in 1909. This island, a 

 tiny sand patch scarcely two miles long in the 

 heart of the Pacific Ocean, had been for centuries 

 a paradise for the albatross. There the birds 



