DANGER OF AN EARLY EXTINCTION OF SONG BIRDS. 187 
undoing.” Where are the flocks of snow buntings that 
used to give a touch of summer to the wintry fields? 
Where are the troops of beautiful cedar birds, of meadow 
larks and purple finches that were a few years ago so 
plentiful ? 
Here are a few statistics gathered by the New York 
Audubon Society: “We know one taxidermist that 
handles thirty thousand bird skins ina year. <A col- 
lector in a three months’ trip brought back eleven 
thousand. From one small district on Long Island, 
seventy thousand were gathered in four months. Feb., 
1886, a New York house had on hand two hundred 
thousand bird skins. Millions are sent abroad. A 
London auction house sold-of these 404,000 in a season.” 
These figures tell only in small part the shameful story. 
Whittier, the kindliest of men, was constrained to write, 
“T could almost wish that the shooters of the birds, the 
taxidermists who prepare them, and the fashionable 
wearers of their plumage, might share the penalty of 
the Ancient Mariner who shot the Albatross.” 
A few more years of such wanton warfare on these 
unbought yet priceless blessings, a few more years of 
crime against the “wise order of the world,” and men 
will walk the voiceless fields and woods, where instead 
of bright wings amid the green foliage, and artistic 
structures filled with eggs and fluttering birds, only 
unsightly nests of crawling worms will dangle from 
leafless bush and tree. In place of soothing, happy 
bird voices, only the fretting hum of troublesome insects 
will worry the listening ear. 
