260 BIRDS IN THEIR RELATIONS TO MAN. 



of which large numbers of several species could formerly be 

 found on this island. But now only a few of these graceful 

 birds remain, and the pot-hunters, or rather skin-hunters, 

 have to go some distance to carry on their cruel occupation. 

 If we consider that with each old bird killed — the killing is 

 done mainly in the breeding season, as only adult birds have 

 suitable plumage — many young, unable to care for themselves, 

 die of starvation, this wholesale slaughter appears the more 

 infamous and criminal. 



Further south, in Florida and along the Gulf coast, the 

 herons and egrets have been ruthlessly persecuted for their 

 plumage. The heronries, where enormous numbers of these 

 graceful birds formerly bred unmolested, have been largely 

 broken up, and only the shyness of those remaining enables 

 them to survive. In a paper read before the World's Congress 

 of Ornithologists, at Chicago, in 1893, Mr. T. Gilbert Pearson 

 describes a visit to a locality known as Horse Hummock, 

 Florida. In 1888 he found several hundred pairs of little 

 blue, snowy, Louisiana, and black-crowned night-herons at a 

 heronry there. Three years later, when he returned to the 

 spot, silence reigned, and only fragments of nests and bleaching 

 bones were to be seen. Plume-hunters had either killed or 

 driven off the entire community. Concerning another heronry 

 Mr. Pearson writes as follows : " 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, the back of each bird raw and bleeding. 

 The smouldering embers of a camp-fire bore witness to the 

 recent presence of the plume-hunter. Under a bunch of 

 grass a dead heron was discovered from whose back the 

 plumes had not been taken. The ground was still moist with 

 its blood, showing that death had not long before taken place. 



